Not another one

Oh dear, more global-warming scepticism on the pages of the Globe and Mail. What has become of Canada’s National Newspaper? Unlike Rex and Margaret, Lysiane Gagnon doesn’t deny that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is occurring and acknowledges that she ought to rely on the opinions of the experts, but she complains that,
“…the findings of the UN panel would be more convincing if they had rested on an open scientific debate.”
Although Gagnon is right to claim that “doubt and scepticism [are] an integral part of serious research,” she is wrong to suppose that the scientific debate about global warming failed in some sense to be open or that the participants in the debate lacked appropriately skeptical attitudes. She offers three central reasons to suppose the scientific debate is (or was) flawed:

1. Unanimity of thought doesn’t “exist outside of totalitarian states.”

2. “In the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the Copenhagen climate-change summit, scepticism – a healthy mental disposition – has become a negative word.”

3. The supposition that AGW is settled science entails that climatology is “a more exact science than, say, medicine or nuclear physics,” and it’s not.

The problem with (1) is that the scientific consensus is the product of thousands of peer reviewed research papers which overwhelmingly confirm the phenomenon of AGW, and not the product of some kind of conspiracy or threats of retribution by Big Science.
UPDATE: I am assuming, of course, that within the relevant scientific community -- working climate scientists -- there is a consensus and, with few exceptions, the dissenters are not members of this community ... and not because of any conspiracy to exclude them.

The problem with (2) is twofold. First, scepticism is healthy only when it is sensitive to the evidence: if one retains one’s scepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, one has instead an unhealthy conspiratorial frame of mind. Second, Gagnon is confusing the public debate about global warming with the scientific debate. Before the results came in, scepticism in the scientific debate was healthy and was treated as such. Now that the results are in, scepticism in the public debate is unhealthy.

The problem with (3) is that it presupposes that if any questions within the purview of a special science are settled, they all are. But the fact that AGW is a settled question in climatology doesn’t imply that there aren’t lots of other unsettled questions any more than the fact that there are unsettled nutritional questions entails that there is no settled nutritional science.

This is all very basic. “A journalist who worked for many years reporting the news” should know better.