Thoughts in a Haystack

Let's compare a couple of pieces ... one from The Wall Street Journal's "Opinion Journal" webpage and one from National Public Radio's blog, 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.

First the WSJ piece, by James Taranto, who was a journalism major who never graduated, and who is complaining about "accountability journalism":

[T]he reason "science" no longer "wins" is that what often poses as science today is different from the real thing. To take an easy example, supposedly science-minded people often scoff at those who do not "believe in evolution." The problem with this is not that they are wrong to defend evolution, but that they mistake evolution, a scientific theory, for a belief system. When you demand adherence to a set of beliefs, you are no longer doing science but something that has the form, if not the substance, of religion.

Similarly, what is clearest from the University of East Anglia emails is that climate science has become more political than scientific. Researchers have been abusing the scientific process in order to produce support for an ideologically predetermined outcome.

And from the NPR site, by Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist, who is Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy Dartmouth College:

For the past decade, and to the bafflement of the vast majority of scientists, the science of global warming became a topic of political debate. In the name of the "fairness of considering all points of view" (there are obvious echoes of the intelligent-design debate here), the minority opinion of a few scientists was inflated beyond any measure of decency to represent a legitimate contrary opinion flushed with supporting data and the like. Nonsense.

As the thousands of scientists from around the world that contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have argued through many different avenues of research and data gathering, global warming is not only a reality, but it is also caused by human action.

First of all, the few, supposedly "smoking gun," emails (out of thousands stolen from the University of East Anglia) do not show any such "abuse" of the scientific process. At worst, they show scientists struggling, sometimes clumsily, with the politicalization of their science by outsiders.

After all, independent scientists ... who have to spend large amounts of their time writing grant proposals just to fund a few graduate students and who can hardly match in resources the various mega-corporations, like the oil and coal companies and the power utilities, which fund most, if not all of the nay-sayers ... have no shared economic or other motive to conspire to "cook" the science ... unlike those corporations. In short, there is much more reason to accept Gleiser's account than Taranto's.

Nor would most scientists think of "believing" in evolution ... at most they "believe" that empiric evidence is the best evidence and the adherence to such evidence is the only demand they make.

Not, of course, that it has never been phrased that way by any scientist. After all, "belief" is a slippery word that is often used informally. It can mean everything from "a deep abiding faith in a particular religion" to "I believe I'll have another beer."

Taranto is turning the whole process on its head. It has been the opponents of the science of evolution who regularly label it as equivalent to "atheism" and the opponents of anthropogenic global warming who label it as a "religious belief." Pot, kettle, black.

The "accountability journalism" Taranto complains about is nothing more than saying that not all positions are equal. Flat Earth proponents don't deserve equal time or journalistic respect with astrophysicists; Holocaust deniers don't deserve equal time or journalistic respect with historians of WWII; and young-Earth creationists don't deserve equal time or journalistic respect with geologists and biologists. Nor do AGW deniers deserve equal time or journalistic respect with climatologists.

Unfortunately, Taranto and the others peddling "Climategate" either cannot see the difference or ascribe to a brand of journalism with no accountability at all.

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Update: Taranto is showing some signs of rationality (scroll down to the section labeled "True Believers?"):

We certainly agree that neither Biblical creation nor "intelligent design" is worth taking seriously as an empirical proposition. Nonetheless, we stand behind our criticism of those who scoff at others for failing to "believe in evolution." Just as it is an error to put forward a religious doctrine as if it were a scientific theory, it is an error to speak of a scientific theory as if it were a religious doctrine--i.e., something to "believe in."

Of course, he is still playing semantic games citing to unnamed "science-minded people" who supposedly urge "belief" in evolution.
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