Watts Up with That is an instructive example, really. Mr. Watts really tipped his hand a few years back. He had been banging the drums on insisting that the m

Watts Up with That is an instructive example, really. Mr. Watts really tipped his hand a few years back. He had been banging the drums on insisting that the measured increase in low atmospheric temperatures had been an artifact of the heat island effect. He insisted that if we take a closer look into the techniques climate scientists use to correct for the heat island effect, we would find that mean surface temperatures had been drastically overestimated. He worked together with some folks to come up with a plan of attack to do just that, and off to the races we went. So what did he do when the numbers came back and it turned out that climatologists had actually been overcorrecting for the heat island effect, with the result being that the study supported the exact opposite of his hypothesis? He moved the goalpost, and carried on. The whole episode really wasn't much different from what we see with other junk scientists who've proven similarly capable of supporting an untenable position in the face of overwhelming evidence on the subject of the supposed vaccine-autism link, or whether or not dogs have ESP. Any of these propositions may be true; in principle any scientific consensus can be overturned (and it has happened in the past). But anyone who wishes to do so needs to be extremely scrupulous in how they assemble and present their arguments. Folks like Lindzen, Watts, and Rutan simply haven't proven themselves to be up to the task. Those who would like to challenge the scientific consensus on scientific grounds rather than the court of public opinion (which is influenced by the Dunning-Kruger effect more than evidence) would do well to try and find more capable spokespeople.