That's completely unavoidable. For example, politicians must decide

• whether power lines or cell phones cause cancer and how to regulate it,
• whether vaccinations cause autism and if we should ban vaccinations
• whether the H1N1 vaccination should be immediately distributed,
• whether humans contribute to global warming and if we should regulate our contributions.

These policy makers can't be expected to be experts in all of these fields. I don't actually expect Senator Lisa Murkowski to understand enough immunology to look at the lab notebooks of the scientists and know whether or not the H1N1 vaccination they created will kill you outright. What I do expect her to know, is who's opinion she should trust. When the scientists at the CDC tell her its perfectly safe and will actually prevent infection, she's just gonna have to believe that and make policy choices based on that information.

No, it's not. How can I even know if I agree with their analysis? For example, if these scientists are telling me that adding GFP to tomatoes that I eat won't cause cancer, I'm not going to take the time (years!) to learn about details of molecular biology in order to evaluate the biochemical pathways they used to back their claims. I'm just going to trust that they know what they're saying. Even if Joe Blogger tells me they will cause cancer because genetic engineer is bad, I'm also going to just have to trust that when the scientists tell me his claim is bogus, that they actually listened to what he had to say.

Yes! If the scientists won't even listen to the claims, then they're not doing their job. We definitely agree here. That's the scientists responsibility to listen to them. But, I sure as hell don't want Senator Lisa Murkowski giving this other guy equal credence if the scientists have already refuted the claims. The politician and the layperson should not simply assume that there are two sides to this story and consider both claims. Neither is actually equipped to evaluate the claims; they simply aren't experts and haven't invested the time.

In my reading of the original article, the author decided to go the route of giving both the scientists and the blogger equal credibility. He took the time to investigate the claims a little deeper (as deep as his understanding would go) and then found that in the end scientists were likely right. His conclusion was simply that he wasted his time and should have stuck with believing the expert. He's not arguing the other guy is automatically wrong just because he's not an expert, but he is arguing he, a layperson, should have stuck with believing the experts; the system worked.

The broader conclusion, from my perspective, is that this is generally going to be the case. Even if I invest 10 years of my life educating myself such that I completely understand the intricacies of some scientific field of study, I'm pretty sure I'll likely agree with the general consensus in that field as it currently stands. This is why I don't actually need to educate myself about everything; I can evaluate claims simply by considering the source. In the case of a general consensus amongst scientists, I trust that the scientific process was followed when evaluating those claims.

Yeah, see, this is where we disagree -- I don't find that frightening at all. As a practical matter I can't take the time to investigate all the claims people make, so sometimes I need a way to relatively quickly place my bets. In the case of science, there's a reasonable system in place whereby erroneous hypotheses eventually get weeded out and a consensus of what is true is formed. So I do immediately assume that claims resulting from scientists in their field are more likely correct than someone not in the field.

If there are 100 scientists who have spent their lives studying a particular subject telling me that Joe Blogger's claim about their particular field isn't true, who do you think I'm going to believe? I really do think you have to sometimes trust other people's opinions -- let them 'decide' for you.

Here's the problem: the Economist article actually responded to the various claims by checking out sources, while Mr Eschenbach's reply ignores the informative responses to his questions from scientists and he doesn't actually show the statistics were bad (he just claims it's obvious they must be). YET, Mr Eschenbach continue to spout out his claims.

So what now? Should the scientists continue to repeat the same thing over and over again back to Mr Eschenbach until he finally decides to spend a few weeks/months/years of his time actually trying to understand the issue? If they do keep responding, then it suggests there's real debate going on here. There isn't. The debate ended when Mr Eschenbach couldn't respond with actual science.

I largely agree with the spirit of what you're saying here, but you're conflating two issues. The author of the Economist article claims to not have the expertise to judge all of the scientific claims made in various quoted articles; so from his perspective, the smart thing to do is to believe the peer-reviewed consensus. That's all he's saying. However, this is NOT to say that global climate scientists within the field should do the same (and I think this is your point). They *do* need to listen to people outside their field and keep and open mind. It's their job.

You're absolutely correct, but the problem is that Mr Eschenbach *hasn't* shown such manipulation. Actually, the real problem is that Mr Eschenbach *thinks* that he has, but doesn't actually know what he doesn't know. In fact, in Mr Eschenbach's response to the Economist article, he states the following:

This quote demonstrates exactly why someone like Mr Eschenbach should be ignored by most people. First, the "arbitrarily adjust" comment reveals that he didn't even understand the explanations given for how things were adjusted (they weren't arbitrary, and that was wells stated). But second, he simply dismisses out-of-hand the possibility that two datasets separated by 1000 km can't be correlated!!! Uh, whoops.

This pretty much proves that Mr Eschenbach is wasting our time. He hasn't taken his own time to understand the arguments the scientists are making (or even basic statistics) and simply continues to repeat his claims.

So the fact that he isn't "decorated by academia" certainly doesn't mean we should dismiss his claims outright, but it probably does mean we should be a little bit more skeptical of his claims that are so far outside of his knowledge base.