By Brandon Keim August 10, 2007 | 12:22:22 PMCategories: Climate, History

“Scientists used to think that the world was flat,” say people who are convinced that earth isn’t warming.

Being six hundred years old, it’s not the best example to use, but I’m generally sympathetic. Scientists, individually and collectively, are fallible. There are plenty more modern examples of this. Plate tectonics, for instance, wasn’t widely accepted until the 1960s.

But it also wouldn’t be hard to flip the argument around and compare the current “global warming is a hoax” crowd to people who insisted that Columbus would sail off the edge of the globe, or drummed Ignaz Semmelweis out of doctoring for saying doctors should wash their hands.

The point is that this argument works much better to counter the notion that scientists are perfect and ought to rule the world, or as a cautionary against dogmatic scientific certainty. It doesn’t work nearly as well to discredit scientists who draw and adjust conclusions in response to data that supports or discredits earlier hypotheses..

[Cont...http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/08/the-worst-anti-.html]