John Tierney was a terrible columnist. Now he’s a terrible science writer:
>After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy.
Let’s reinterpret this. “After not doing any serious research on global warming, I went to talk to a famous and obviously unqualified skeptic, who, oddly, doesn’t really even doubt the reality of global warming.”
I’m still not firing my Amish electrician.
Stuff like this is really depressing, the description of a prevailing scientific model as “orthodoxy”…just more framing science as essentially a religious cult.
It’s a sad mistrust and misunderstanding of Science because there’s no orthodoxy and there’s certainly no place for a “scourge”…so many writers fail to appreciate scientific methodology and the peer review system. They don’t comprehend that it would be very, very exciting to demonstrate a major flaw in scientific “orthodoxy”; in fact, such discoveries make careers. There’s this deranged notion that there are all these truths Science just can’t handle and has to repress. It seems like some kind of projection bias.
The “best” example of this awfulness hands down is Ray Comfort/Kirk Cameron describing the banana as “the atheist’s nightmare”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zwbhAXe5yk
That’s right Dagon. Speaking of the banana:
http://thenonsequitur.com/index.php?s=banana