Journalists should be careful, as the Columbia Journalism Review suggests.

There are many people out there, some of them w-a-a-a-y out there, who write perfectly plausible sounding explanations of various phenomena. They use tautology, selective information, circular argument, ad hominum attack, and outright lying to challenge conventional wisdom.

For example, I saw an ad in the Smithsonian magazine for a coffee table book, Our Undiscovered Universe, that explains the universe, black holes, dark matter, and... well... everything. It's one of those unified field theory things that informs the reader on everything from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the largest galaxy, all for 90 bucks. What a deal, right? Its author, Terrence Witt, actually responds to blog criticisms of his work by restating some equations that prove 0+0=0 and then proposing this proves his theory of the universe. Maybe it does, but it sounds to me like “Nothing from nothing leaves nothing,” which I already knew from listening to the Billy Preston song.

Witt seems to be smart enough, and he doesn’t rant and rave when he answers his critics. In fact, some of his critics get a little snide and self-satisfied when they dismiss Witt as a crackpot. His motivation seems to be that he’d like to be the next hero of the scientific revolution. There are plenty of these guys around, but most of them are too weird and too poor to advance their theories very far. Witt has some money and some connections, and he knows how to use them. He also sounds perfectly sane and reasonable, so he’s not scary strange. More importantly, he appears to have no hidden agenda. Although his ideas anger some people, Witt seems to be genuinely motivated and fundamentally honest, at least to the extent he’s not out to deceive anyone for political or financial gain.

The same cannot be said of many, many other “dissenters” and this is where journalists get into trouble. Most journalists are not subject matter experts, so they tend to evaluate scientific assertions based on what other experts, or “experts,” say about them. Journalists tend to overlook some pretty obvious political agenda when evaluating scientific dissent, and they have trouble separating science from pseudo-science. So we get articles in popular publications promoting Bermuda Triangle theories, creation science, alien abductions, Bigfoot sightings, etc. as legitimate scientific inquiries. Every “expert” has a list of books, articles and affiliations to establish legitimacy, or at least the appearance of legitimacy.

This is what the Columbia Journalism Review article warns against. Don’t mistake taking sides for scientific curiosity. The global warming debate is politically charged, and various persons and institutions stand to gain or lose a great deal, depending on what we decide to do (or not do) about global warming. There are many “experts” funded and promoted by The Institute of the Important Sounding Name weighing in with data and conclusions that “de-bunk” global warming. Most such experts are hardly disinterested, since their research funding and book sales depend on industry groups who cut down trees, mine coal, drill for oil, generate electricity, etc.

Also, don’t mistake scientific disagreement as a battle between old and new scientific paradigms. The debate over global warming does not involve a Kuhnian paradigm shift. The various proponents of the various positions are collecting the same data and analyzing it according to the same principles of meteorology, climatology, physical geography, biology, physics, chemistry, statistics, etc. The paradigm shift will be political and financial, not scientific.

So, the CJR advice is basically sound. Don’t get sucked in to believing every debunker is a misunderstood genius struggling to break free of the group-think mediocrity imposed on his or her discipline by a bunch of consensus minded colleagues. Scientific consensus can be wrong, of course, but the critics of the developing consensus on global warming advocate retreating to the previous consensus, which amounts to doing nothing and trusting technology to solve the problems created by technology. They’re not scientific revolutionaries themselves, as they’d have us believe, but absolutely opposed to scientific revolution.

There are parallels to instruct us. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she was attacked by debunkers who sounded like those now objecting to the global warming consensus. Some of it was very personal and mean, impugning her sanity and her sexuality, if you can believe it. Fortunately, most honest scientists recognized Carson was calling attention to a real crisis, something that was actually happening and could be documented, even though they realized Carson’s appeal was largely emotional and scientifically flawed. The result was the DDT ban, which saved the bald eagle, among many other species, from extinction.

But Carson’s detractors are sore losers. Now that the bald eagle is no longer threatened with extinction, the debunkers say the whole thing was a manufactured crisis in the first place and would have taken care of itself. There was no reason to ban DDT, they claim, and doing so promoted worldwide famine and caused malaria deaths by the millions. Carson was the devil.

And journalists hopped on the bandwagon. They reproduced accusations that Carson was responsible for more deaths than Hitler. They researched their articles by lifting quotes from authors who contribute to organizations like junkscience.com and others who insist that science should direct itself at the goal of making life easier, safer and more comfortable for a consumerist society. This was all very convenient, since Carson was long dead and the problem she identified had been effectively addressed by regulation and enforcement. And it sold newspapers.

This is the point of the CJR article. Go ahead and promote your byline. Sell your papers. Advance your career. Just don’t forget you owe your readers something of the truth. Journalistic ethics require discriminating between various sources of information. Some sources should be used with skepticism and some should not be used at all. It’s difficult to determine the difference, particularly when the writer doesn’t have the scientific background to draw a clear line. Conveying the truth involves more than presented the reader with John said this and Mary said that. Who is John? Who is Mary? Where do they get their funding and support? What do their peers say about them? Not everyone who challenges scientific consensus is a martyr.