Here’s a really good post at The Island of Doubt about a talking point that’s suddenly everywhere in the denial-o-sphere: What is this ‘settled science’ of which you speak?

In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as “settled science.” First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically “So much for the science being settled. Now what?” The following day the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page weighed in with a review of “what used to be called the ‘settled science’ of global warming.”

Both offerings betrayed a solid lack of understanding, not only of recent events involving recent allegations of errors in IPCC reports, but also of how science works, further reinforcing the thesis that journalists who write about science really should take a few courses in the subject first.

The Wall Street Journal editorial, it will come as no surprise, is the most egregious of the two when it comes to misrepresenting matters climatological. Citing Jonathan Leake of London’s Sunday Times demonstrates just how little respect the WSJ editorialist has for responsible journalism. But Wente does more or less the same thing; she just doesn’t bother to source her statements back to the discredited journalists who first came up with some of the more outlandish allegations.

More troubling, though, is the fact that both writers just don’t seem to get the nature of the scientific process. Science is never completely “settled.” Of course, much our understanding of the way the universe works has long been nailed down to the point where there’s little to no controversy among scientists. But even on the most fundamental matters generally taught to students as an established fact, there are always scientists poking around the edges, looking for flaws in the ointment. Nothing is ever settled. Indeed, almost every scientist makes his or her living challenging what others have already agreed.

Read through the archives of magazines like New Scientist, for example, and you’ll find plenty of features investigating such things as modified Newtonian dynamics (maybe F doesn’t always equal ma), or theories that suggest the speed of light might actually change over time, or that Darwinian natural selection might be in need of some rethinking. Papers are being written every day that remind us that our understanding of nature is an evolving and neverending process. We’re forever refining and reforming our model of reality. Anyone who suggests that the science is “settled” is missing the point.

So if ever there was a straw man in climatology circles, it would be that the science of anthropogenic global warming is “settled.” It isn’t and never will be.

And on a related topic, Tim Lambert has been all over the unreported story of Leakegate, a sordid tale of scientific illiteracy and journalistic malfeasance.