CONSENSUS WATCH – 12/31/2008

An ongoing series dedicated to vigorously monitoring emerging threats to The Consensus that global warming is real, caused by humans, and must be addressed immediately. Because without consensus, scientific conclusions would remain vulnerable to new data.

In some ways, it’s been a tough year for The Consensus.  Recent research has cast some doubt on anthropogenic global warming, large numbers of scientists are in open rebellion and actual climate observations have not been particularly helpful.

But that’s only if you rely exclusively on such areas of research as climate science, meteorological science or atmospheric science.  Sure, there’s been some erosion in these fringe disciplines, but the real breakthroughs are being made in a far more important discipline:

Political science. 

You need look no further than Barack Obama’s pick of John P. Holdren for his science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology.

Years of disciplined experimentation and extensive field research by Mr. Holdren and his colleagues have provided valuable insights into the complex processes involved in political science, such as the unusual phenomenon in which someone can be spectacularly and consistently wrong for an extended period of time and yet still retain many of the elements of credibility.

Prior to these groundbreaking discoveries it was believed that large amounts of new data clearly demonstrating the weaknesses of an existing theory would be taken properly into account, but that was before we fully understood the effect that prolonged exposure to sufficient levels of hysteria would have on human physiology.

An equally powerful force of politics with which Mr. Holdren has extensive experience is the phenomenon known as “the ad hominem argument.“

While ad hominem arguments were known at least as far back as the early Greeks, it was only with the advent of recent technologies that such attacks can be leveled with wide-ranging effectiveness. Believe it or not, there was a time when scientific debates focused on the merits of the argument at hand (an often frustrating and tedious process), rather than more important factors, such as where a person's funding comes from, his or her political affiliations, and what they can get through Congress. The ad hominem argument will be an important contributor to properly maintaining The Consensus against attacks from those other scientific disciplines, which frankly, have been nothing but a nuisance lately.

John Holdren, together with Stephen Chu, president-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Energy, and Jane Lubchenco his choice to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will create the greatest assemblage of minds ever to tackle the many challenges we face in the field of political science. 

As president-elect Obama put it, "It is time to muster the political will for concerted action."

And just in the nick of time!

J.