Politicians Dressed in Lab Coats

Donna Laframboise
"..Personally, I’ve had it up to here with scientists who sneak their political views into the conversation beneath their lab coats. We need clarity about where an individual’s scientific expertise begins and ends. Scientists owe us professional, circumspect information – not political opinions masquerading as scientific fact.

So the next time you hear a glacier specialist declare that the debate is over remember that the same Syed Iqbal Hasnain who expressed such strong political opinions appears to have been startlingly ill-informed regarding the glaciers about which we’re told he’s an expert.

And the next time you hear a climate modeler talk about specific measures that must be adopted in order to avert calamity remember exactly what his job is. It’s to program a computer with hundreds of assumptions about the natural world – in other words, educated guesses. It’s then to produce “story lines” and “projections” about what the future might look like in the unlikely event that most of those educated guesses hit the bullseye."