Jeff Fink wrote:
Listen, neither you or I are climate scientists. Therefore it's only logical to listen to the mass majority of PhD climate scientists.It is the liberal way to silence dissenting voices. The size of the mass majority is skewed because the esteemed potential dissenters are keeping quiet to preserve their careers.
No, it is not liberal. It is the conventional approach. It is apolitical, or perhaps slightly conservative, I suppose. Generally speaking, conservatives believe that you should pay heed to established experts and textbook science. (And I fully agree with them about that.) Conservatism means you honor and give special weight to established, mainstream standards. There is no question that the mainstream in climate science now supports the global warming hypothesis.
Everyone involved in cold fusion knows that dissenters sometimes keep quiet, and that science, like all other human institutions, is sometimes political. That's human nature. (Primate nature, actually.) However, just because sometimes, in some cases, the majority lords over the minority, that does mean it always happens, or that the minority view is automatically correct. If that were true, all of science and technology would be dysfunctional, all textbooks would be wrong, and we would still be living in trees. The fact is, most of the time the majority of experts are right, and it is a good bet they are in this case.
The majority does not go about squelching minority views unless it is motivated to do so, and unless the minority is powerless and despised. For example, plasma fusion researchers attack cold fusion because they fear they will lose their funding. In the case of global warming, the minority of experts who say it is not occurring is anything but powerless! On the contrary, this group has the full support of the U.S. President and both political parties, plus any amount of funding from industry. Influential columnists and other opinion makers often repeat claims made by the anti-global warming researchers, and others in the anti-global warming camp such as economists who claim it would cost too much to fix the problem, or the extreme nut-cakes who claim that global warming would actually be beneficial. Despite the fact that this minority is influential beyond its numbers, the majority of climate researchers are in no danger of losing their funding, so they are not motivated to attack the minority the way plasma fusion scientists are. I have never read one of them claim that the minority is doing "schlock science" or "fraud" but only that they are wrong.
I have deliberately framed this discussion purely in terms of whether as a rule you can believe experts or not, without regard to the actual content of the claim. Along the same lines, in the previous message I wrote: "I do not know enough about the technical issues surrounding global warming to judge whether the effect is real or not . . ." That is an overstatement. I do know something, and I think the data is increasingly compelling. It will not be as compelling as a cold fusion experiment until we fry the planet and the damage is done. The statements circulated by anti-global warming researchers and by columnists such as George Will strike as being increasingly unsupportable. Furthermore, the steps required to reduce global warming would almost all be beneficial in other ways. For example, they would reduce U.S. dependency on foreign oil and the terrorism sponsored by some OPEC members. So even if global warming is not happening, we should take vigorous steps to reduce CO2 emissions anyway.
- Jed
