"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Monday, July 9, 2007

Documenting the Consensus

Does science work by consensus? Actually, hmmm, yes, in fact, it does, as Naomi Oreskes and myself and perhaps most interestingly George Musser in Scientific American have recently asserted.

A very impressive collection of pro-consensus statements has been put together by "Logical Science" a.k.a. M.J.Sparrow a.a.k.a. Wacki, and can be viewed online here.

4 comments:

Andrew Dessler said...

FYI, the Texas A&M ATMO department has just issued its own statement here ... see here for the Battalion story.

Would be great if UT did something similar ... (hint, hint).

Sparrow (in the coal mine) said...

Tobis & Dessler,

Thanks for the hat tip. I'll add it to the list A.S.A.P. Lists like this are of great value as it lists the scientists *by name*. Libertarians generally have a strong distrust of large organizations. A petition signed by 100 individual scientists would mean a lot more to a libertarian than 1 governmental organization representing 300 scientists.

Sparrow (in the coal mine) said...

Somebody posted my consensus link on SciGuy and this was the response it got:

As for this blog entry you link to, it appears to be a Grist type, nuf said. But I am amused to see the only atmospheric sciences department in the country that felt compelled to produce a position statement on AGW is, where else, TAMU!

Eric, I will never comment on religious topics, except the AGW cult of course.


Just giving you a little more motivation than a "(hint hint)".

Michael Tobis said...

There is no atmospheric science department here, guys! The rule is pretty much one per state at the ag school, plus one at MIT and one at Princeton.

I'm not sure TAMU meteorology is the first to stick their neck out with a unanimous statement, but I'm confident UT Austin geosciences is not going to be next. I've heard there are some diehard skeptics at the Bureau for Economic Geology for instance. (I haven't met them yet. It stands to be interesting.)

I am quite possibly the lowest PhD on the rather large totem pole here and I'm surely not going to pick that particular battle. I have a lot of other windmills to tilt at, but thanks for thinking of me.