[jdlshore]

It may all be people, but some of those people have spent an inordinate amount of time learning the current state of the art in a particular field, and contributed new information to help advance the state of the art in (mostly microscopic) ways. We call those people “scientists.”

(People without that monomaniacal background and focus still write about science, but they’re prone to making basic errors. We call them “journalists.”)

[starkd]

True. But they still need to come out of their labs and talk to normal people by persuading them. Their scientific perch doesn't give them the right to be a dicatator. We are still free to reject their conclusions. That is our right.

[jdlshore]

That’s kind of a non-sequitor, isn’t it? Scientists aren’t being dictators. But climate scientists specifically are raising alarms, with an unprecedented level of consensus. We ignore those alarms at our peril.

Climate science is full of well-meaning laypeople rehashing basic facts, and doing so poorly. I’m not a climate scientist, and I don’t know the details, but I know enough to know that figuring out historical temperatures is a whole branch of science with massive amounts of work and research behind it. This amateur comes along with a naïve data collection methodology and gets some results that casts doubt on one of the fundamental facts of climate science—that the world is getting warmer.

At this point, he could have stopped and said, “this data is completely out of line with the established science. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand.” Perhaps do a literature search to find out how data is collected and confounding factors are addressed.

Or he could throw his crap data up “without comment,” implying that he’s found some secret. Pfeh. Lazy and irresponsible. At the bare minimum, he could have shown a little intellectual courage and asked what he was missing, and why his data was at odds with the scientific consensus.

The scientific community encounters these sorts of well-meaning amateurs all the time, particularly in physics. They combine ignorance and enthusiasm into an unending firehose of time-wasting ideas. They’re called “crackpots.”

[starkd]

They are not all "crackpots". Many environmentalists have come forward stressing the importance of walking back some of the verge-of-catastrophe alarms that have been pulled. (Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and one former Obama administration advisor, to name a few). They are not saying its a non-problem, but they are saying it's completely manageable without destroying civilisation by hiking the cost of energy.

These alarms bells have been pulled repeatedly over the past 50 years. Calls for imminent catastrophe in just 10 years if nothing is done. That was 20 years ago. At some point, you have to wonder just who is profiting off of your fears while flying around in their private jets. That should tell you something.

[jdlshore]

I wasn’t familiar with those names, so I looked them up. Neither is a climate scientist. According to Wikipedia, “ Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.” Lomborg’s book was found to be “scientifically dishonest through misrepresentation of scientific facts.”

I'll let you have the last word.

[misslibby]

The "environmental scientists and academics" in question have probably also been accused of bad science by their opponents. And who gets to decide who is the scientist in that debate?

Shellenberger and Lomborg have presumable studied the issue for decades, so at what point does one cross into "being a scientist" territory? Years of study apparently doesn't do it, so what does? Obama's seal of approval?

You are confusing science and specific systems of doing science, like say a countries university system. A specific system of doing science does not automatically produce good science.

[jacquesm]

It requires continued adherence to the scientific method. As soon as you stop doing that you stop being a scientist, whether your name is Shellenberger, Lomborg or Watson for that matter isn't relevant. Science is what you do not who you are.