citizens push back against authority

Here’s foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead explaining the point I was trying to say yesterday, better than I probably managed to.  If the press had been doing its job, he explains in a recent blog post:

Climate scientists would have realized long ago that if they hope to convince a skeptical world they need to be ultra-careful, ultra-cautious and even ultra-conservative in their public statements and recommendations. They would have understood long ago that because their science is important, they have to do it more carefully and more publicly than other people. That may be harsh and it may be ‘unfair’ in some sense, but when you are dealing with the interests of billions of people you have to expect a little bit of scrutiny.

And expands in a recent television interview (starting at 25:05) with an example from the IPCC’s recent troubles: