No more NYT

[athena]

42. Do you also believe

we should be debating things like slavery, forced sterilization for the poor, and child labor? Whether gravity is an attractive force? Whether disease is caused by evil spirits? Is there anything that is settled in your mind?

There are some things that don't need to be re-debated and re-tested endlessly. As I have tried to explain several times now, science could not advance if accepted results could not be accepted as foundations upon which to build new results. And, as a former scientist, I believe it is important to leave the science to the scientists. There is a reason it takes a Ph.D. and years of training to do scientific research. Even scientists in other fields, let alone laypersons, are incapable of contributing in a meaningful way. All they can do is waste the scientists' time by forcing them to explain basic things they lack the knowledge and training to understand.

It's sad that we have arrived at a point where no one respects training and credentials any more. Any guy on the street (and yes, I mean "guy", since it's always men who behave in this know-it-all fashion) thinks he can dismiss the findings of tens of thousands of climate scientists. As a physicist, I trust and respect the training, competence, and scientific integrity of the tens of thousands of climate scientists who say that climate change is real and is caused by human activity -- just as when I worked on my Ph.D. thesis, I did not try to re-test and re-establish the centuries of physics -- or the newer results that were only years old -- upon which my own results were built. Trusting science means trusting scientists, and having the humility to accept that a non-scientist is not the equal of a scientist when it comes to critiquing the work of said scientist. If a scientist makes a mistake, it will be another scientist who will discover this -- not some guy on the street, or some opinionated guy with a newspaper column. Science has its own way of weeding out bad results; it's what makes it so powerful. If you cannot trust science to do that, then you don't believe in science or the scientific method, period.