While I’m ham­mer­ing the notion of dis­sent in sci­ence, there are a cou­ple of pieces to dis­cuss. The charm­ing Sci­ence­Blog had an arti­cle a while back head­lined News­pa­pers’ focus on bal­ance skewed cov­er­age of glob­al warm­ing. The upshot is that arti­cles about glob­al warm­ing tend to over-empha­size the exis­tence of any dis­agree­ment about the nature of cli­mate change. Almost every sci­en­tist who has looked at the data and the mod­els that have been pub­lished agrees that aver­age tem­per­a­tures will rise mea­sur­ably in the next 25 years, and will con­tin­ue long after that. Most sci­en­tists also agree that that process is under­way already, and the con­se­quences for life, human and oth­er­wise, will be substantial. 

There are a small num­ber of peo­ple who dis­agree. Many work in or near the fos­sil fuels indus­try. They argue that we can’t be 100% sure that every­thing that works in the lab will work plan­et-wide. Our mod­els are based on assump­tions and the lim­it­ed under­stand­ing we have of com­plex weath­er pat­terns. This is all true.

It is also irrel­e­vant. In a court of law, we could­n’t get a con­vic­tion from what we have. We prob­a­bly also could­n’t get a con­vic­tion from a jury over rel­a­tiv­i­ty, spe­cial or gen­er­al, and prob­a­bly New­ton­ian laws of grav­i­ta­tion could get a hung jury with the right lawyers.

Fifty years ago, the tobac­co indus­try, aid­ed by tru­ly great sci­en­tif­ic minds like Ronald Fish­er, avoid­ed legal action against can­cer sticks through sim­i­lar argu­ments. Cor­re­la­tion does­n’t equal cau­sa­tion. Lab­o­ra­to­ry stud­ies of rats may not gen­er­al­ize to the com­plex real world of humans. Stud­ies by inde­pen­dent sci­en­tists show­ing that tobac­co caus­es can­cer can be matched by Big Tobac­co fund­ed research show­ing no effect.

Now, Big Tobac­co argues against any lia­bil­i­ty for their prod­ucts because evi­dence, and a grow­ing con­sen­sus, exist­ed about the dan­gers of smok­ing when many mod­ern can­cer patients start­ed smok­ing. In essence, they argue “It’s your own damn fault for believ­ing us.”

They are prob­a­bly right, as will the cli­mate sci­ence skep­tics be 30 years from now when Flori­da is almost entire­ly under water.

It isn’t clear that the “Intel­li­gent design” gang will ever be made to fess up. After years of hard work, they snuck a pla­gia­rized arti­cle into a small jour­nal. They can now claim some sort of par­i­ty with real sci­en­tists. “Look!” they’ll say, “our one paper more than bal­ances 150 years of metic­u­lous research which entire­ly sup­ports the neo-Dar­win­ian syn­the­sis. We are no longer crack­pots, but pub­lished scientists.”

A skep­ti­cal pub­lic would con­sid­er this argu­ment, and would con­sid­er that they only got pub­lished by cheat­ing. A sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly lit­er­ate press would essen­tial­ly ignore this paper next time Kansas drops evo­lu­tion from the schools. This isn’t good sci­ence, and The Pan­da’s Thumb has a bunch of arti­cles explain­ing why. It does­n’t inform the debate, because it isn’t good sci­ence. Only good sci­ence coun­ters good sci­ence. One great exper­i­ment can unrav­el a bril­liant mod­el, but one crap­py arti­cle does­n’t mat­ter to anything.