Kraalspace cites Chesterton on Climategate:
Even in those things he [Sir Arthur Keith] betrayed a curious simplicity common among such official scientists. The truth is that they become steadily less scientific and more official. They develop that thin disguise that is the daily wear of politicians. They perform before us the most artful tricks with the most artless transparency. It is like watching a child trying to hide something. They are perpetually trying to bluff us with big words and learned allusions; on the assumption that we have never learnt anything – even of their own funny little ways. Every leader-writer who thunders “Galileo” at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does. Every preacher of popular science who throws a long word at us thinks we shall have to look it up in the dictionary and hopes we shall not study it seriously even in the encyclopaedia. Their use of science is rather like the use made of it by the heroes of certain adventure stories, in which the white men terrify the savages by predicting an eclipse or producing an electric shock. These are in a sense true demonstrations of science. They are in a sense right in saying that they are scientists. Where they are perhaps wrong is in supposing that we are savages.
But it is rather amusing for us who watch the preparations for giving us an electric shock, when we are seriously expected to be shocked by the shock. It is rather a joke when we, the benighted savages, are ourselves not only quite capable of predicting the eclipse, but capable of predicting the prediction. Now among these facts that have been familiar to us for a long time is the fact that men of science stage and prepare their effects exactly as politicians do. They also do it rather badly – exactly as politicians do. Neither of these two modern mystagogues has yet realized how transparent his tricks have become.
And isn’t that exactly how the skeptics have been portrayed – as savages? For more see Melanie Phillips’ takedown of the reporter who contrasts the “formidable array of scientist” supporting global warming with those “noisier, less qualified pundits” (i.e. savages).
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