The scientific findings indicating that anthropogenic climate change is occurring at an increasing rate, with far-reaching consequences are about as robust as science ever gets. Nevertheless, they are under ceaseless and increasingly aggressive political attack. So, how can one tell if a scientific idea has any merit in the face of all this political grandstanding?
It's quite simple, really. Sit back for a short time and watch other scientists react to it.
Two weeks ago, NASA scientists published a paper in Science, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science.1197258 presenting evidence that arsenic could replace phosphorus in at least one species of living organism, an extremophile bacterium in Mono Lake, CA. This would be, if true, a Really. Big. Deal. So people read the paper. Very. Carefully. In less than a week, scientists have come pouring out of the woodwork, discrediting the research findings and techniques used in the paper. See http://rrresearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/arsenic-associated-bacteria-nasas.html and the comments therein for one example of the critique. At the very least, there remains a great deal of more careful data collection to be done before any sort of confidence can be assigned to these findings.
This is exactly the sort of response that scientists expect and desire, but with the spread of the blogosphere, it is now much more public than it ever has been, which means that even casual readers can see the testing of scientific ideas in action. If you believe that scientists tend to stick up for each other in some kind of secret society, take another look at those comments on RRResearch - it's a feeding frenzy. This feeding frenzy is not an aberration, either. This is how scientists talk to each other, even scientists who fundamentally respect each other.
When ordinary people think someone they know and like has made an error, they may elect to keep it to themselves to protect the relationship. People don't generally go to a dinner party where the chicken soup is too salty and say to the host, "You know, I've reviewed your technique and you clearly forget to account for the effect of increasing concentration due to evaporation losses." But, in science that is exactly what scientists do to each other. Unchallenged mistakes are a big problem so it is best to shed light on the problem immediately. Ideally, this happens pre-publication, in the peer-review process. However, no system of review is foolproof and editors may also opt to publish something they think is important, even in the face of reviewer's objections. It's not yet clear what happened during the publication of the NASA results, but it should be clear in the aftermath that poor science, once exposed to the view of the scientific community, does not stand for long.
Big news in science, just as in other fields, can get a lot of media hype and that hype may or may not be justified in the end. Ditto for political attention. If you want to know if the science is any good, however, don't pay any attention to the media or the politicos. Instead, pay attention to the scientists.
