Jaw-droppingly Stupid!

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote what has to be the most infuriating, obtuse, and arrogant piece of punditry about science writing I've seen in a long time:

I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? ... You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can't. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized. If global warming is real, and if it is new, and if it is caused not by nature and her cycles but man and his rapacity, and if it in fact endangers mankind, scientists will probably one day blame The People for doing nothing. But I think The People will have a greater claim to blame the scientists, for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

Everyone got that? If global warming isn't real, we can blame the scientists because they were too political and weren't clear enough. If global science is real and disaster takes hold, we can still blame the scientists because they were so political we, "The People" (how arrogant, how outrageous does she think she is to capitalize that?), can feel morally righteous in our willful ignorance of the alarms they raised.

Peggy, here's a hint: other than the tiny smattering of shills and ideologues from your party who happen to have PhDs in something or other, the vast majority of climatological scientists have said, in one voice, global warming is real and human activity is causing most of it. Now deal with it. It's their job to tell politicians what can be done, but:

Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

It is not the job of science to tell the rest of humanity what it should do.

Grief, can she really be so stupid and arrongant at the same time? This isn't the flamin' 1950s, scientists in lab coats are no longer robots in service to Science And Man, but human beings who do good science. The process is open and more democratic than Peggy Noonan's brain, and still her side of the aisle can't figure out how this science thing works.

(Hat tip to Chris Mooney for the headsup.)