Climategate

In a thoughtful piece on Climategate, John Tierney observes that: "Contempt for critics is evident over and over again in the hacked e-mail messages, as if the scientists were a priesthood protecting the temple from barbarians."

It's a very apt analogy. Just as priests have a vested financial interest in promoting doubt-free belief in their gods, so to do the climate scientists. Bret Stephens WSJ op-ed is a must read on this point:

All of them have been on the receiving end of climate change-related funding, so all of them must believe in the reality (and catastrophic imminence) of global warming just as a priest must believe in the existence of God.

None of these outfits is per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.

Please go read the whole thing.

Comments

[Eric Rasmusen]

To extend the analogy, there are even quite a few people who say, in effect, "Gee, this does look really bad, but this stuff is esoteric and even tho I'm an expert in my field, the ways of God are mysterious and we just have to trust the priests." Perhaps we should compare this to the Roman Catholic priest-molester-coverup which worked for so many years and then collapsed.

[lgm]

Scientists achieve those amazing breakthroughs because their egos are involved. Read the "Double Helix" -- the trash talk James Watson dishes out towards Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling and the brilliant experimentalist Rosalind Franklin, whose work he stole. And this is the cleaned up published version.

Rank and file climate scientists are no better, and no worse. Yes, they disrespect global warming deniers in private emails. But that disrespect was amply earned. Would you doubt the expertise of a biologist because he or she used a profanity to describe the "Intelligent Design Institute"?

Get to know actual scientists, not just the naive caricature by Francis Bacon. Do you think scientists don't care whether their theories are true or not? Do you think Einstein would have spent years eating dinner in his study if he didn't care?