That?s the lesson Newsweek?s Daniel Lyons has learned in the debate about global warming. In his latest column, Lyons bemoans that fact that ?brilliant? scientists who push the alarmist line haven?t yet won the fight:
[L]ook at what they’re up against: a noisy babble of morons and Luddites, the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, the birthers, and tea-party kooks who have done their best to derail health-care reform and will do the same to any kind of energy policy. [Science czar John] Holdren has an undergraduate degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from Stanford; he has won countless awards for his work on nuclear proliferation, climate change, alternative energy, and population growth. But now he must sell his ideas to people who couldn’t pass high-school algebra?and who believe they know more than he does.
One suspects that Mr. Lyons would shy away from a comparison of his own intelligence ? or even academic prowess (a very different characteristic) ? with those of climate skeptics Richard Lindzen, John Christy, and Roy Spencer.
I also wonder what he would make of Christy?s science-based rebuttal of the alarmist arguments William Schlesinger offered earlier this year in the John Locke Foundation debate captured in the video below.
