If you believe everything you read in the blogosphere you would imagine that the scientific community was awash with Climate experts. On a daily basis I hear someone being introduced as a climate expert. But there is no such thing. It is like a Cardiac surgeon claiming to be a human body expert. Just because he has expertise in one aspect of the human body, in this case – the heart, this does not give him the right to claim expert knowledge of the entire human organism. And indeed no surgeon would make such an outrageous claim. So why do we allow these scienticians to get away with claiming to be experts in the equally complex area of the climate. To run with the human body analogy a little longer we might perhaps compare a meteorologist with a GP (General Practitioner) but having said that who in their right mind would allow a GP to treat them if they got their diagnosis (or forecast) as wrong as the average weather man/woman (for the Brits – who can forget Michael Fish). The climate and its influences are many and varied and in numerous ways are far less understood than the workings of the human body.

So often I read claim and counter claim between warmists and sceptics about whose scientific qualifications are superior to who’s when debating a particular point about Global Warming. This is Aristotle’s number one logical fallacy, similar to the child’s playground retort of ‘My dad’s bigger than yours’ but because we are adults we call it the appeal-to-authority fallacy.

I think the most glaring example of this was Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s dismissal of Indian Glaciologists when he accused them of using Voodoo science because they dared to question his sacred IPCC’s peer reviewed data on Himalayan glacial melting. The subsequent investigation exonerated the Indian scientists extracted an apology from Pachauri and exposed the fact that a lot of information used by the IPCC that should have been peer reviewed (including the Himalayan Glacial melt claim) was not.

If the head of the IPCC can be such a jerk when it comes to an appeal-to-authority on climate then I doubt there is anyone else who could claim to have a greater breadth of knowledge of climate that would single them out for the title of ‘Climate Expert’.

I believe that Paul Krugman in his latest Op Ed for the NY Times is endangering his reputation as someone whose opinion is worthy of note. Professor Krugman is an Economist, and while a self confessed liberal thinker, is a diligent researcher when it comes to his chosen subject. It is disappointing then, when he chooses to write on the equally complex subject of Global Warming, that he chooses to abandon said diligent research and instead takes the easy way out by parroting the alarmist rhetoric of (Human caused) Climate Change divas such as James Hansen.

When I see Krugman’s latest article talking about “the drowning of Florida by rising sea levels” and corn price records caused by the Midwestern drought (surely bio-fuel production is the cause of this one – as an economist he should know this) I know he has not done his homework.