Experts and intellectuals

I doubt whoever chose today's "quote of day" as it appears on my RSS-fed personalized Google homepage, was thinking about the recent climate-denying nonsense at the American Physical Society. But the timing was impeccable. First, the quote:

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared. - PJ Plauger

When it comes to the climate crisis, that's bang on. Of course, there is always room for dissent on scientific issues, but the key to making sense of any resulting debate is to know who is qualified to weigh in and who isn't.

The APS fiasco, in which a journalist with no scientific credentials, Christopher Monkton, was allowed to participate in a society debate about climate, is an excellent example. He's not scared of global warming. But he's not an expert. Not even a scientist. Just a hack journalist.

Another inescapable fact is no one has enough time to evaluate all the arguments of everyone who has something to say on a subject, so we have to apply expertise filters. And when we do, we discover that very few of those who aren't at least somewhat concerned about the consequences of business as usual on the climate front are climatologists.

On a related note, I'd like to draw everyone's attention to something Christopher Hitchens wrote a few weeks back on the subject of what constitutes an intellectual, and how that relates to popularity.

One might do worse than to say that an intellectual is someone who does not attempt to soar on the thermals of public opinion. There ought to be a word for those men and women who do their own thinking; who are willing to stand the accusation of "elitism" (or at least to prefer it to the idea of populism); who care for language above all and guess its subtle relationship to truth; and who are willing and able to nail a lie. If such a person should also have a sense of irony and a feeling for history, then, as the French say, tant mieux. An intellectual need not be one who, in a well-known but essentially meaningless phrase, "speaks truth to power." (Chomsky has dryly reminded us that power often knows the truth well enough.) However, the attitude towards authority should probably be sceptical, as should the attitude towards utopia, let alone to heaven or hell. Other aims should include the ability to survey the present through the optic of a historian, the past with the perspective of the living, and the culture and language of others with the equipment of an internationalist. In other words, the higher one comes in any "approval" rating of this calling, the more uneasily one must doubt one's claim to the title in the first place.