My sympathies as a fellow academic lie with Mann. And yet, as a believer in the First Amendment, I am troubled. I would rather that name-calling weren’t a regular part of our public debate, but it is. Indeed, I should note for the uninitiated that “molested and tortured data” is the sort of molested and tortured prose that academics commonly inflict on each other (and the great unwashed beyond the campus) in this unenlightened era of discourse.
I myself have been accused from time to time of lying about the evidence or reasons for my views on a variety of subjects. Ad-hominem charges have no legitimate place in the academy — always be wary of the scholar who attributes motive to another! — but I’m uneasy at the thought that even so scurrilous a claim should be actionable.
Of course we need defamation law. But our constitutional tradition correctly makes it difficult for public figures to prevail. Close cases should go to the critic, no matter how nasty or uninformed. The preservation of robust dissent allows no other result, and robust dissent is at the heart of what it means to be America.
I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the cure for bad speech is good speech. Yes, it’s a cliche. But it’s also a useful reminder. Nobody is forced to enter public debate. Once you’re there, it’s rough and tumble. Unfair attacks are as common as dew and sunshine, and everybody’s reputation takes a beating. That’s the price of freedom.
As I noted on Twitter yesterday, it’s kind of ironic that such a tool is head of the “Skeptic Society.” I was actually a member myself back in the eighties, until I realized that it was mostly just an excuse to bash traditional religion and push fashionable lefty causes.
Considering the difference between weather and climate expertise provides an interesting example of the many dimensions of expertise that are needed to address a complex science/policy problem. It is well known that there are many professional meteorologists that are not convinced by AGW arguments. It has been argued that meteorologists are not climate experts, and hence their opinions should be discounted relative to climate experts. Well, many climate experts know nothing about climate dynamics; rather their expertise is in the area of climate impact assessment. Meteorologists generally have a very good understanding of climate variability and the natural causes of climate variability. Discounting the expertise of meteorologists in the climate debate in part has led to the current conundrum for climate science whereby natural internal climate variability has been discounted.
The broader and more significant issue of relevance to climate science expertise is the new phenomena of independent climate scientists, who have no formal training in climate science or its subfields. The emergence of Steve McIntyre as an expertise on paleoclimate proxy data and the statistical analysis of climate data was viewed by university/IPCC paleoclimate experts as an absolute affront, as evidenced by the Climategate emails. The influence of Steve McIntyre on the course of paleoclimate research and the public debate on climate science has been profound.
Dr Xing Li, an Aberystwyth University expert on astrophysics and cosmology, said as a scientist it would be “beautiful” to be one of SpaceShipTwo’s privileged passengers.
But SpaceShipTwo travels at a super-sonic 2,500mph – more than four times faster than a passenger jet – and Dr Li believes it’s difficult to imagine anything that goes at that speed becoming affordable.
He said: “Now we don’t have supersonic flights because of the cost issue. At the moment I don’t see that it will be possible even in 30 or 40 years. It will only happen if we have some technological advance that would bring down the cost.”