The right-wing elements of the blogosphere have long despised Jim Hansen, he of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, for repeatedly undermining their thesis that all climatologists are either idiots or communists. But the one thing they really can't stand is someone who has the nerve to change his mind.
Having run out of distortions and exaggerations to nail to Hansen's proverbial posterior, they have turned to complete fiction. Tim "Deltoid" Lambert has all the details, but I want to explore the bizarre notion that scientists should never change their minds, which is implicit in this most recent front in the anti-Hansen campaign.
The background in a nutshell is that Washington Times (yes, that Washington Times) reporter John Caslin wrote a story a week ago in which are told that Hansen "who has publicly criticized the Bush administration for dragging its feet on climate change and labeled skeptics of man-made global warming as distracting 'court jesters,' appears in a 1971 Washington Post article that warns of an impending ice age within 50 years." Imagine that. He appears in an article.
For his crime, which turns out to be creating a computer program that modeled the Venusian atmosphere and was later by others to explore the possibilities of an imminent ice age here on Earth, Hansen was once again insulted and disparaged by the usual suspects. (Here's one of the worst offenders.) Hansen was none too pleased, and in a commentary (PDF) available on his website, compared the latest smear tactic to "swift-boating."
The comparison is apt, considering that Caslin was part of the swift-boat campaign in 2004 that libeled John Kerry, as Media Matters ably documents.
It's bad enough that Hansen's enemies aren't capable of properly investigating insinuations against their target. But even if what they were implying was true, (which, just to be painfully clear, it isn't) so what?
Think about it. Hansen is accused of nothing more than changing his mind. He wrote a computer program that other researchers found useful. In what universe would that mean he must share the conclusions of those other researchers? But again, even if he did agree with the idea that we're heading into a cooling period, it was 36 years ago! In what universe does that mean he shouldn't be able to change his mind in the light of future evidence?
Indeed, a scientist would only be open to valid criticism if he or she refused to come around to a new opinion in light of evidence that refutes the original hypothesis. Imagine that in some parallel universe Hansen's alter ego had once embraced a global cooling proposition, but later switched over to the global warming position once the data came in. That would say more about the compelling nature of the evidence than the integrity of the scientist.
I would think that after 40 years of research, if you haven't changed your mind at least once on something significant, you're missing the point of science. Not only do you have a right to change your mind, you have an obligation to do so. I'm relatively confident Hansen has done so from time to time, even if the subject at hand isn't one of those times.
All of this is lost on Hansen's enemies, all of whom predicate their disdain on the notion that there used to be a consensus among climatologists that we actually were headed for an early ice age. As has been thoroughly documented time and time again, nothing could be farther from the truth. No peer-reviewed papers were ever published putting forward such an idea. Even the paper produced by the authors who borrowed Hansen's program explored much broader concepts, and the only printed matter to make it into the libraries was a brief April 28, 1975, Newsweek article that misconstrued what scientists were thinking about -- and, curiously enough, became what the magazine's current editor describes as "probably the most cited single-page story in our history."
But such misdirection pales beside this latest broadside against not only a respectable scientist, but the very essence of what it takes to be a good scientist.
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Just wanted to let you know that I'm using this post today as a springboard to a discussion of two points in today's writing class: (1) that a good writer goes where the evidence takes him--he is not supposed to start with a position and single-mindedly pursue it, ignoring inconvenient data (or truths, as the case may be), and (2) that a responsible writer does not argue ad hominem--a writer cannot discredit an argument by impugning the motives or character of the individual advocating the argument.
I framed my post on the assault on Hansen in terms of the following quote:
"Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman." - Arthur Schlesinger
To me, what I find disturbing about the attack on Hansen and the larger conservative movement attack on so-called "liberal" science (Regnery's Politically Incorrect Guide series comes to mind) is the parallels with other ideologically motivated on science that we've witness from authoritarian regimes. I'm specifically thinking of Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union where they viewed Mendelian genetics as "fascist" science, and Nazi Germany where they viewed theoretical physics as "Jewish" science.
The authoritarian personality despises people who change their minds when the evidence changes. They only value people who they can be confident are reliably in their corner. Unfortunately a lot of voters share this style of thinking, hence the devasting effect that charges of flip-flopping can have in a political campaign.