It isn’t hard to come up with examples of the whole science establishment being wrong about something, but examples of Joe The Plumber being right when scientists were wrong, are harder to find.

Science isn’t like logic. An appeal to authority isn’t a fallacy here — authority matters in science exactly the same way it matters in medicine (“Doc says I’ve got TB, Ned says it’s just a cough. Better go with Ned!”). The clincher that prevents this from being the runaway “decider” authoritarianism is that science clinches on physical evidence. I don’t care if Stephen Hawking himself tells me black holes are made of condensed unicorn farts; if he can’t supplement his claims with evidence it’s not science.

In the case of the UHI arguments, for instance, some morons take single pictures of single stations in urban environments and say the entire world network is flawed. What they miss is that they never do analysis on the network as a whole, testing the (published!) methods of compensating for the UHI — in other words, they don’t back their claims up with evidence. In fact, infamously, one guy actually DID write his own code from the published algorithms and compared the results from only the “best” stations to the official final results (using all stations). The result agreed in what he called “an extraordinary exoneration of GISS” (the group that does the analyses), demonstrating either that the “worst” stations were adjusted for properly, or the criteria used to judge best/worst were flawed. Neither of these points sunk in on this fellow’s host nor his peers, who to this day accuse GISS of fraud every single post, ignoring an independent public demonstration of their lack of evidence.