In “Promises, Promises,” Stuart Blackman warns: “Ill-judged predictions and projections can be embarrassing at best and, at worst, damaging to the authority of science and science policy. (The Scientist, Volume 23 | Issue 11 | Page 28). (Registration wall)
As Michael Gerson, who does not dispute global warming, puts it, in the famous East Anglia e-mail thread:
… the dominant voices are ideological. The attitude seems to be: Insiders can question, if they don’t go too far. Outsiders who threaten the movement are “idiots.”
This attitude is demonstrated, not only by private e-mails, but also by the public reaction of prominent scientists to those e-mails. They show “scientists at work.” They are “pretty innocuous.” They are “understandable and mostly excusable.” “We are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment.” This “kind of language and kidding goes on verbally all the time.” Criticism is based merely on “ignorance” and critics have “more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger.” It is the scientific equivalent of discounting Watergate as a “second-rate burglary.”
[ … ]
… outside the Copenhagen bubble, the field of climate science is deep in a crisis of professional credibility, which many scientists seem too insular to recognize. Fifty-nine percent of Americans now believe it is at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research to prop up global warming claims. If the practices at East Anglia are dismissed as “scientists at work,” skepticism will rise as surely as temperatures.
– “The scientific war on science,” Townhall, December 11, 2009
What these scientists seemingly don’t get is that transparency matters, especially when they are asking people to make big changes or big sacrifices.
They behave like a new tax-funded aristocracy. Oh, right. They are. And about as much loved as most.
The comparisons between Climategaters and Darwinists are suggestive, to say the least – except that the Darwinists are so arrogant that they make their abuse public.
Hence, they are believed even less than the Climategaters.