Washington Post editors privilege the science-isn’t-consensus argument

The 1 September Washington Post editorial page does something it would likely not have done two years ago: it highlights a climate-consensus denier’s lengthy letter arguing that “science does not progress by consensus.”

A sarcastic Richard Cohen column inspired the letter . Cohen attacked Texas governor Rick Perry as “intellectually unqualified to be president,” in part for denial of the climate consensus. There “are some scientists who are global-warming skeptics,” Cohen wrote, “but these few — about 2 percent of climate researchers — could hold their annual meeting in a phone booth, if there are any left. (Perhaps 2 percent of scientists think there are.)”

Now the Post editors have presented a long rebuttal letter in the “Taking Exception” slot at the bottom of the opinion page’s left-hand column containing editorials.

The writer, Bill Burdett of Silver Spring, Md., begins by likening Cohen to “scholarly and ecclesiastical authorities” who represented a scientific consensus for the “Ptolemaic model of the solar system back in the medieval ages.” Mr. Burdett continues: “But science does not progress by consensus. It took a small number of ‘cranks’ and ‘deniers,’ including Galileo, to dismantle this theory that had reigned for a thousand years.”

Burdett allows that “Earth’s complex climate system responds to a variety of inputs,” of which “human-generated pollution is one.” But the “key issue before us is the actual impact of human pollution on climate change,” he declares, and to “believe that this issue is resolved by authoritative consensus is simply unscientific.” Science’s task “is to test the hypothesis of human-caused global warming against physical data over time.” In this effort, the “use of computerized climate simulations will help improve our understanding but cannot substitute for real-world data.”

Using scare quotes on the key word, Burdett asserts that reliance “on ‘scientific’ consensus and simplistic and unproven simulations requires little thought. The hard thinking comes when we try to discover the correct explanation.” He ends with this: “Politicians have reason to be skeptical of science when science loses its skepticism of ‘received’ knowledge.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.