By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
I call it "the Galileo argument."
It frequently pops up in defense of people whose ideas lie out of the scientific mainstream. When Galileo argued four centuries ago that the Earth circles the sun, the argument goes, he too was out of the mainstream.
It is an argument that has some currency this month, with the release of novelist Michael Crichton's new anti-global warming thriller "State of Fear."
It is perhaps fitting that Crichton, whose "Jurassic Park" so informed (and uninformed) our public understanding of paleontology, would become our new public expositor on the complex and contentious issues of climate science.
Fitting, but not necessarily helpful.
Crichton used the Galileo argument in a widely read and surprisingly influential speech he gave in January. Speaking at the California Institute of Technology, Crichton said this:
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
"There is no such thing as consensus science," Crichton continued. "If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."
It's a rhetorically powerful line of argument, such that it is frequently quoted, especially by critics of the so-called "consensus" among climate scientists that greenhouse gases from manmade exhaust pipes are altering Earth's climate.
But Crichton's argument misunderstands how science works, and how public policy works.
In any interesting science— and by that I mean science where research is being done in earnest on unsettled questions, such as climate change or black holes— one finds mainstream views and intriguing mavericks.
The mainstream gets codified in textbooks, representing a "consensus" of scientists working in the field, while the mavericks poke away from the fringe. Sometimes the mavericks turn out to be right, and the mainstream shifts their way. More often than not, they turn out to be wrong.
If the argument is about something arcane, like the underlying nature of a black hole, we can all cheerfully wait to see who is right.
But what if we need to make a decision— now? What if we need to decide, say, whether to vaccinate our children against mumps, or whether action is required to deal with climate change?
In that case, we have a longstanding and reasonable tradition of seeking out the mainstream, assembling the best minds and reviewing their understanding of the best science currently available— in other words, trying to figure out what the consensus might be.
On the question of climate change, the world community has done this in what is arguably a more thorough way than in any other area where science and public policy intersect.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convened under the auspices of the United Nations, brings together thousands of the world's top climate researchers to regularly report on the state of the science.
The IPCC's most recent report's conclusion is clear: the planet is warming, sea level is rising, glaciers are melting and we're to blame: "Most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."
Other bodies, from the American Geophysical Union to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, have come to the same conclusion.
The climate community has its mavericks, scientists who question this consensus.
But Crichton's attack on scientific consensus, his version of "the Galileo argument," is not terribly helpful in sorting out the question of who is right and what we might need to do as a result.
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