"The most effective people at finding errors in scientific reasearch are scientists: it was professional glaciologists, after all, who exposed the error in the

"The most effective people at finding errors in scientific reasearch are scientists: it was professional glaciologists, after all, who exposed the error in the IPCC 2007 case study of Himalayan glaciers." To exclude the amateur is to deny a large part of the history of science. Well, he's not saying that a scientist is always right and an amateur is always wrong. He's just saying that a scientist is more likely to find errors in research material, which I think sounds reasonable since they're supposedly trained to do it. Then there's e.g. the good ol' "seeing what you know is there instead of what's actually there" effect which works against those who've spent a lot of time with something. Good find on the bad data, btw! Real science is in the numbers, not in the propaganda surrounding them.