The Faculty Affiliate Network panel discussion at Duke last night was quite a show. The issue was should the university reward faculty participation in the public debate? The consensus seemed to be, yes but not much. It should not be considered as much as the two primary duties of faculty, research and teaching.
Since William Schlesinger, Dean of the Nicholas School of Environment and Earth Science, was one of the speakers, the discussion slipped over to climate change. It seemed that Schlesinger wanted it both ways. On one hand, he defended science as unbiased because scientists “love to criticize each other’s work.” Thus science is self-policing. (I don’t recall Dean Schlesinger applauding this JLF Spotlight criticizing of the infamous global temperature “hockey stick” graph.)
On the other hand, he said that there was scientific “consensus” that the human caused rise in carbon dioxide was causing the earth to warm. He equated scientists who disputed this “consensus” with those who believe that the “world is flat and the moon is made of green cheese.”
Attempting to shut off the scientific debate is in itself un-scientific. Science is not a democracy where the “vast majority of scientists” decide what science is. There are numerous examples of the vast majority of scientists being wrong. My favorite is the story of Alfred Wegener the German astronomer who invaded the scientific world of geology and offered the theory of plate tectonics early in the 20th century.
The geologists circled the wagons and attacked this unqualified outsider for his outlandish theory. It was not until the 1950s, long after Wegener’s death, that scientists gathered enough data to prove his theory correct. If consensus had ruled and scientific debate was successfully shut off by the “vast majority of scientists,” science would not have advanced.
But that is not the end of the story. Scientists must remain open to scientific evidence that even this theory is wrong. See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
It seems that Dean Schlesinger should welcome peer-reviewed scientific debate about the causes of current global warming. Instead he is attempting to shut off debate with his “the earth is flat” rhetoric. But if you read between the lines, you see that the real purpose of shutting off scientific debate is to move to the next phase which is to pressure policy makers to do something about it. In other words, the goal of most global warming alarmists is not science, but to become Plato’s philosopher-kings. They want political power to impose their save the world “solutions” on the rest of us regardless of the scientific uncertainty.
