It is probable that most people in the developed world respect scientific method, especially in modern Europe where few are impressed with creationist nonsense. And yet there is growing scepticism - not so much about science as scientists.

An analogy might be with traditional catholicism where a catholic can be faithful to the entire belief system and yet be anti-clerical in private, cynical about a particular priest yet never the Church.

The point is that the priesthood is sacred but a man in office may be accepted as flawed - an attitude that permits a believer to be resilient in the face of allegations of (say) child abuse in Ireland. The men in the Irish case were weak but their weakness has no effect whatsoever on the message of St. Peter.

Modern science is slipping into the same situation as it matures into our shared social consensus. If few doubt scientific method, many now doubt, thanks to increased knowledge of psychology, sociology and even anthropology, that scientists are anything other than as flawed as the rest of us.

The Roots of Scepticism

Scepticism comes from a variety of sources. The first source of scepticism is our contemporary awareness that paradigms change and supplant one another much as Thomas Kuhn initially proposed in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962).

The Social Darwinist, racist and eugenicist nonsense of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was scientifically valid in its time but vicious and ultimately proven to be wrong. Naturally, an intelligent sceptic asks: "if such models were so flawed then, why not current models equally so ..."

The partial answer, of course, is that we know more now than we did then to which the reply will be - " ... and we will know more in the future so let us be cautious in accepting any theory while a single anomaly continues to exist".  An attitude about which we will have more to say later ...

The second source of the sceptical caste of mind is everyday human experience. People have 'interests' and will 'talk their book' - and they are quite capable of deluding themselves in order to maintain their livelihoods and status. This is true in business, politics and the churches so why not in the sciences?

Any biography of a scientist of note will show the reader that science is very social - who you know and what you belong to will often dictate success and patterns of behaviour.

Scientists are also quite capable of inordinate ambition, negativity towards others, competitiveness and even downright malice. They can also be surprisingly cunning, selfish and stupid - just like the rest of us. Though great scientists often are great men or women, the scientific community can be small-minded.

If scientists are no better than priests, civil servants or local newsagents in terms of their moral worth and scientific communities are as 'human' as Parliament or the Institute of Directors, then it is no surprise that the public are wary of trusting to their authority more than anyone else's.

Interest and Climate Change

Alongside suspicion that no paradigm is certain and that scientists are flawed even where their methods are not, we have patronage. In a system where a patron (now generally a State which has a political agenda) makes it known what it wants, scientists will gear research to meet that expectation.

A proposal on (say) monkeys in the Amazon becomes a proposal on the effects of climate change on monkeys in the Amazon because funding bodies are more interested in climate change than monkeys and the monkey scientists need funds to study their monkeys. Ergo, they study climate change.

The leak by Wikileaks of e-mails between scientists at the University of East Anglia was a reminder of all these 'softer' aspects of scepticism - climate change just might be a questionable paradigm constructed by experts with an interest in the subject. For example, an observer might wonder ...

• why the climate change movement was taking experts on trust in ways that were closer to a faith-based movement than rational discourse: most people in the street are arguing from faith in scientists (authority) or from political interest as ideological environmentalists;
• whether the merging of scientific evidence and the ideological movement behind action on climate change should create concerns about what was not being discussed - the silences as well as the assertions;
• whether those with a dissident view were being deliberately excluded and why the ideological claque committed to a deal at Copenhagen were descending to insult and ridicule, terming opponents 'deniers' (in an analogy with Holocaust revisionism) or as little better than creationists?

Faith-based arguments from authority, a single line that excluded debate and insult and vilification of heretics, positioning scientific critics as little better than creationists, suggest something closer to the worst excesses of the early Church rather than rational scientific debate.

What was not being discussed with the same fervour were the costs of action for developed countries, the historical injustices to developing countries and whether adaptation might be a more sensible strategy than political fixes designed to get a global commitment to a policy at Copenhagen.

What we had here was a movement in which the primary driver was not rational investigation of facts and anomalies or an objective debate about costs and solutions but a coalition where politics was dictating posture and language. Politics is, as we will see, not science.

Cold Fusion - A Case Study

We are not arguing against the propositions of the climate change lobby. We do not know who is right or wrong but we retain our right to a degree of scepticism about the assertion of claims from 'experts' that go beyond their own area of competence or are taken up by faith-based movements.

Our own working model is that there may well be global warming taking place but that the best way forward is not to spend vast resources trying to resist change or get a unified global response but that we should, as a nation, begin to invest in a necessary adaptation to change.

But rather than argue though what is only a belief based on concern that the scientific community has been pushing their luck in allying with particular political interests, I think we might usefully look at another case where science has shown itself unreliable in its political reactions - cold fusion.

Again, we have no idea if cold fusion will bring us unlimited safe energy in the future. Somehow we doubt it. But it is not absurd to consider the idea that chemical reactions at 'room temperature' might generate the same conditions for fusion that high temperatures can create as a hypothesis, no more.

In 1989, two scientists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced that they had achieved cold fusion. The 'achievement' was recognised as limited by themselves but, as so often, they were bamboozled by university PRs into endorsing a news release that claimed more than they had a right to.

Cold Fusion - Fifteen Year Pariah

These were not young graduate students but serious scientists with a track record and what happened next is a lesson in how science really works - remember, the two scientists had merely undertaken an interesting experiment. It was an ambitious university that had over-promoted it.

The claim was tested by the US Department of Energy and they were negative. Pons and Fleischmann, the most experienced in the field, were treated as pariahs, no funding was forthcoming - and no bright young graduates dared to go into the field, certainly not ask for funds on their own account.

From an initial blunder, the entire machinery of the scientific community moved against these two scientists and their careers were ruined. Cold fusion was widely regarded as a joke. And yet ...

A rare moment of praise for the military-industrial complex and an argument for diversity in science ... the US Navy continued to explore cold fusion on the quiet, renamed as 'anomalous effects on deuterated systems', and, sure enough, another scientist Melvin Miles reproduced Pons' and Fleischmann's result.

Unfortunately, reproduction of these results proved a hit and miss affair and, when naval money dried up in 1996, Miles became, according to Michael Brooks, effectively unemployable - because of his association with 'cold fusion'.

Another very prominent scientist Julian Schwinger became a figure of near contempt because of his scientific interest in the theory of 'cold fusion'. In 1991, three years before he died, Schwinger wrote:

The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science.

More Than Meets The Eye

So far so unfortunate, but so what - maybe Pons, Fleischmann and Miles were not quite so good as they thought they were and Schwinger had gone a bit weak in the head in his latter years. Maybe the ruling scientific 'paradigm' was so strongly established that these people were no better than creationists.

But Schwinger was simply thinking like a scientist should. He did not say that there was or was not something called 'cold fusion'. All he said was that there was an anomaly and that the anomaly should be investigated. Could nuclear energy be produced through chemical (atomic) manipulation?

He tried eight theories and none quite made the grade but still he tried. Oh, by the way, Schwinger had co-shared a Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics but, well, let's just put that to one side, shall we?

Finally, in 2004, a decade after Schwinger's death, the Department of Energy changed its mind - there might be something in this anomaly, an awkward fact on the ground, after all!

Things had changed. The naval research was now available in full and it turned out that one of the original and most damning reports on which the original Department of Energy had made its funding assessment had been ... flawed.

Interestingly, a blunder in 1989 that led to the resignation in protest of MIT's then chief science writer meant that an MIT report of the anomaly did not appear in the original report until after it had been presented to Congress. So that was that then ... the politicians had decided. End of story until 2004.

Lessons For Science and Politics

With subsequent research showing that the anomaly is real - that some kind of nuclear reactions are going on - we find ourselves wondering what had been happening here. Science was not happening. Politics was happening. Cold fusion was pariah. The consensus had decided.

We can be pleased that, in the end, the facts on the ground eventually led to opportunities for research being reopened some fifteen years after the first misreported experiment and Americans can be gratified that American bureaucracy permits multiple agencies to compete on establishing the truth.

But careers were ruined or placed into doubt and scientists were deprived of funding not because these were bad scientists or cranks but because the weight of community opinion had witch-hunted some into a corner on the basis of surmise and a misreading or distrust of what few facts were available.

It is not that cold fusion will solve our energy needs (it probably will not) but it is a fact on the ground that needs explaining. Science is not served by ignoring anomalies or forcing scientists into some paradigmatic, conceptual or ideological straightjacket - in the liberal West any more than Stalin's Russia.

Currently, research is just interested in the anomaly, that is all. Current thinking is that a nuclear reaction does take place under certain conditions and that this has yet to be explained - it is not by any means necessarily a sign of extra energy, heat production or nuclear fusion.

Brooks' quotes the Economist of 1989 with approval - whether right or wrong, Pons and Fleischmann's experiment was 'exactly what science should be about'. But what does all this have to do with the climate change debate?

The Politics of Science

A consensus in science only expresses a probability until all anomalies have been explained. While there are legitimate scientific critics of the prevailing consensus, who are independent of special interests and with insights from their field, we should assume nothing. Crushing dissent is bad science.

At the moment, a sort of existential panic has set in - especially on the centre-left. The fear is that if we do not do anything now about 'climate change', we will all end up on the film set of 2012. History tells us that such hysteria usually leads to serious and often irrecoverable and expensive policy mistakes.

But this is about politics, not science. It is about a centre-left that has lost its way and is desperate for a universal cause (and why not the 'planet' as substitute for humanity!) and about Western governments trying to retain their influence in the world while their populations grow restless.

[The facts of the cold fusion story were culled from '13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of Our Times' (2009) by Michael Brooks but the opinions are entirely those of TPPR]