FIELD OF SPECIALIZATION

A secondary enviro complaint has been that two of the four authors of our review article (Zachary and I) have not published research on climate change - that I am out of my field of specialization and therefore should not be believed. The truth is that I should not be believed in any case. To the enviros, science is a religion to which converts are added by belief. The reason the 8-page review was written was to communicate the fully referenced facts on both sides of this issue to scientists - so that they could easily locate the information needed to reach their own objective conclusions. Criticizing scientists for being out of their field is a purely polemical exercise than has been used repeatedly in science - usually by mediocre people who cannot protect their turf from interlopers of greater ability. The reporter from Nature raised this issue with me, but retreated when I started listing research fields that had been revolutionized by scientists from other fields.

In this case, we do not even claim to have done original research. Climate science is indeed quite simple. Very few parameters have been measured, and, since reliable data are not available with which to study the detailed complexities, interpretation is necessarily empirical and uncomplicated. Actually, biochemists are especially appropriate here because they are practiced in obtaining definitive information about far more complicated systems than the atmosphere, whereas physicists specialize in much simpler systems. Physicists tend, however, to have more rigorous standards of intellectual honesty than do biologists. This may be part of the the reason that a disproportionately high number of physicists are signing the petition.

In fact, virtually anyone with a good education in any scientific discipline has more than enough training to evaluate the information relevant to global warming and reach a sensible conclusion - if he is not blinded by ideological prejudices as are most of the enviros.

•	The "Consensus" is Dead
•	SCIENCE AND ADVOCACY
•	PEER REVIEW
•	*FIELD OF SPECIALIZATION*
•	STARK RAVING MAD
•	GOOD READING

Vol. 25, No. 8

Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
Volume: Issues
Issue/No.: Vol. 25, No. 8

Date: April 01, 1998 03:52 PM
Title: The "Consensus" is Dead