How Journalism Is Like Science

I love you. Yes, you: the person reading this blog. You're attentive and smart. You care about science. You're patient with all of us who post—our mistakes, our foibles, our points of view. And that's awesome.

I particularly love those of you who post comments. It doesn't happen often, but sometimes we hit a hot-button issue like Al Gore and climate change, and the crowd goes wild. It's 10:39 AM on March 23, and we're over 105 comments. Amazing.

But here's the thing: One of the reasons I like science, and journalism, and science journalism, is that in none of those three fields are you allowed to just make stuff up. So when someone like, oh, say, commenter Ben writes something like, oh, say, this:

i wonder what would happen if we didn't burn billions of barrels of oil? would it overflow to the surface eventually? it seems like something bad would happen. Hmm now it also seems to me that we're just converting that CO2 from petro to the air where it originated in the first place. Maybe we are actually turning back the planetary clock and buying ourselves a few more million years?

...all I can say is: Dude. People. Please. There's no shame in saying "I don't know what to think about this; it sure seems complicated." There's a little shame in ad-hominem attacks on Al Gore and the environmental movement, but I guess some of you are just into that kind of thing. That's cool. But when your main argument that global warming isn't real goes something like, "scientists are wrong about stuff sometimes, who are these IPCC guys anyway, and couldn't the real answer be something completely unknown," well, you aren't doing science or journalism. You aren't even thinking clearly. You are cheating.

Ah, well. Love is like that sometimes.