I’ll add this:

In grad school one of our professors invited a speaker on climate change to one of our ag engineering weekly seminars. This guy had shared in the IPCC Nobel Prize.

Guy shows up like a rockstar, kind of ridicules the size of our venue, clearly thinks he is hot stuff.  And he shared in a Nobel Prize, no matter how politicized, I’m sure his department head treated him well regardless.

Guy starts off on his presentation, gets a couple slides in.  Up comes a graph of his work of 40 years of temp data modeled 100 years into the future.  About how the world was going to end.  And the questions start.  And there we sit for quite some time, because (a) that’s just irresponsible trend projection outside relevant limits, (b) we had questions about and eventually issues with the underlying data IIRC, and (c) I don’t even think we thought the curve fit all that well.  Maybe r-squared of 0.85?

Dude looked like a poleaxed steer by the end, I don’t think he was in any way prepared to defend the validity of his work. 


Healthy skepticism is good.  I’m all for it.  Willful shouting down of what we do actually have a good handle on is not so healthy.