Interesting, so global warming isn't happening then, right? After all, only those pesky climate scientists say it is, and of course their research funding under the extremely liberal Bush administration is linked to them finding critical environmental problems that will cripple the fossil fuel industry, right?

How about peak oil, clearly that isn't happening either, as only the geologists and scientists say it is. For every scientists who believes this, Exxon can show you 50 hairdressers who do not.

Science isn't a popularity contest. 99.99% of the people who know anything about the field concluded that the Reimann hypothesis was true about 100 years ago, and yet a mere vote isn't enough, they still are trying to show it.

Here's my idea. If some tenured professor who answers to nobody (even his students perhaps), and spent his life studying a field you haven't the foggiest clue about says a thing is true, and the rest of these scientists agree with him, and they put their research out there where you could review it if you had the skills and inclination, perhaps it is more prudent to believe that it is probably true than to believe that it must therefore be false.

The greens and the right wing could really learn from each other, well, already have I guess. The greens complain about the wingnuts dismissing every shred of scientific evidence with respec to global warming, while simultaniously doing exactly the same thing with respect to nuclear power. Funny how life works.

Pardon, I now see that my post omitted some statements.

The observations I shared with TOD, which I'm quite sure other physicists on TOD share, was mainly about the behaveor and the way they argue. There is no room for doubt and they uncritically postulate that all problems will be solved within the necessary timeframe.

It's a slighly unintelligent and counterproductive retoric because it repels many people who may potentially be in favour of nuclear.

Science isn't a popularity contest.

A somewhat amusing comment BTW. You know, there is quite a lot of academics who have studied the scientific community which more or less conclude, loosely speaking, that science in fact is a popularity contest. Of course, there are other scholars which oppose such views. I guess what you has been told about science mainly depends on who's outnumbering who :)

But of course, the above scheme is not absolute. Many times minor positions gain ground on basis of the contents of the arguments.

It's easier for "science" to avoid being a popularity contest in some fields. I'm not quite convinced that e.g. predictive climate science is one of them. Too much politics and orthodoxy.

(I'd briefly like to mention that i favour all carbon reducing measures. I live in norway, love tax.)