I liked NASA climatologist James Hanson's response -- in the form of an explanation of an unclear quote -- to this weekend's New York Times Magazine article on heterodox scientist Freeman Dyson:You might guess (correctly) that I was referring to the fact that contrarians are not the real problem – it is the vested interests who take advantage of the existence of contrarians.There is nothing wrong with having contrarian views, even from those who have little relevant expertise – indeed, good science continually questions assumptions and conclusions. But the government needs to get its advice from the most authoritative sources, not from magazine articles. In the United States the most authoritative source of information would be the National Academy of Sciences.
There are two climate change discussions that occur basically simultaneously. The first asks how to get the information we want. The second asks what to do with the information we have. The first is a scientific discussion while the second is a policy discussion. Contrarians like Dyson have a more obvious role in the first discussion. The scientific consensus should probably dominate the second discussion. But, in practice, the two have gotten mixed up. The media gives a disproportionate amount of coverage to the intellectual dissenters in the policy process, and that has, in turn, spurred the climate change community to spent a lot of time emphasizing and defending the degree of consensus in the scientific process. It's bad for everyone.The role the contrarians are playing in the policy process is not the role they play in the scientific process. As Hanson says, honest contrarians are being elevated out of convenience: Convenience for the media, who hungers for conflict, and convenience for vested interests, who encourage paralysis by promoting uncertainty. And so they end up being attacked, and their defenders cry that good science demands frequent dissent, and so we go. Scientists like Hanson, of course, recognize the role of independent thinkers in the scientific process. The argument is over the disproportionate, and generally cynical, attention they receive in the policy process.
