A short piece for the general audience of RTR radio, Perth, Australia. (listen to the original audio podcast) What does the color of tomatoes have to do with the price of catfish in Venezuela?
Nothing whatsoever, as far as I know.
Now suppose your gardener claims to be an expert tomato chromatologist one day, and then a leading ichthyologist the day after. Would you trust his expertise?
And would you trust this guy if he first claimed that tomatoes weren’t red and then tried to convince you that catfish don’t have gills?
Probably not.
We all know that we must trust experts at one point or another; we must trust our dentist to decide how to fill our teeth, for example, and we must trust the plumber’s advice on our broken hot water system.
But we also know that experts are experts precisely because they specialize in one thing and one thing only. We would not trust our plumber with doing a root canal or with the welfare of Venezuelan fish.
So if anyone claims to be an expert on completely unrelated things, we should become suspicious. And if that person says the opposite of everything we’ve ever heard before, then we should be doubly suspicious.
This is one of the many reasons we should be very, very suspicious of the so-called “skeptics” who deny the basics of climate science. Many of the same so-called “skeptics” who presently seek to create doubt about climate science are the very same people who 20 years ago tried to tell us that smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer.
