Real Climate continues their attack against facile denial of climate change. (Hat tip: David Sucher). Lately, George Will is their target for propagating two fallacies of Michael Crichton’s: a) confusing local and global climate change, and b) concluding that change of scientific consensus means that consensus itself is subjective herdthink. (Mind you, Will’s favorable comparison of Crichton to Ayn Rand is enough to put me off: does anyone besides ideologues and middlebrows find her novels genuinely entertaining or well-written?) But what leapt out at me was the response to one of the comments:
While the ‘consensus’ is not infallible, the contrarians have a much worse track record. Remember N-rays, cold fusion, the memory of water, innumerable perpetual motion machines etc.? Each time, the same statements are made ‘they laughed at Galileo’ (see John Fleck’s description of the Galileo argument) as if one example of a correct contrarian validates all other contrary beliefs. It doesn’t.
Well put. And John Fleck’s article itself is a good distinction between the demands of science and policy science.
The mainstream gets codified in textbooks, representing a "consensus" of scientists working in the field, while the mavericks poke away from the fringe. Sometimes the mavericks turn out to be right, and the mainstream shifts their way. More often than not, they turn out to be wrong. If the argument is about something arcane, like the underlying nature of a black hole, we can all cheerfully wait to see who is right. But what if we need to make a decision— now? What if we need to decide, say, whether to vaccinate our children against mumps, or whether action is required to deal with climate change? In that case, we have a longstanding and reasonable tradition of seeking out the mainstream, assembling the best minds and reviewing their understanding of the best science currently available— in other words, trying to figure out what the consensus might be. On the question of climate change, the world community has done this in what is arguably a more thorough way than in any other area where science and public policy intersect.
Of course, it’s only when we very toward policy as opposed to pure science questions that people begin to champion the heterodox voices and claim that "real science is not consensus science."
Like I’ve said before, orthodoxy has its problems, but it’s often better than the alternative.
UPDATE: Via Panda’s Thumb, I found a hilarious spoof “debunking” of plate tectonic orthodoxy.
No comments have been added to this post yet.