In addition, computer modeling is inherently flawed with complex systems such as climate. There is no way that all variables can be included, and predictions be reliably made.

That doesn’t mean that energy conservation and searching for better energy sources shouldn’t be undertaken. But not in a spirit of panic and doomsday.

It took about five years for M&W’s gastritis theories to be somewhat accepted and used as a basis for treatment, and twelve for this to become scientific consensus.

Good work rises to the top. No one is going around suppressing geniuses. Ideas that contradict accepted theory have to earn their respect, that’s all.

It took about twelve years from the time Lister started his research for antisepsis to become widely accepted, and his techniques were being used much earlier than that.

That’s the way science works. Bright young hypotheses grow up into solid evidence-based theories when they’re right.

RealClimate does not ridicule McIntyre, they publish papers demonstrating that he is wrong, and that the hockeystick is real.

If you preselect the scientific theory you wish to believe based on your prejudices, you will inevitably be led into error. Just because you hate what liberals make of global warming doesn’t mean it’s false.

Hyman, there’s also a statistician who the Realclimate guys continue to ridicule to this day even though he has been proven right. His name is Steve McIntyre (www.climateaudit.org), and he broke Michael Mann’s hockeystick. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

Answer Correct + Method Wrong = Bad Science. Mann, Gavin Schmidt and the rest of the Realclimate guys just don’t have the intellectual honesty to admit it to themselves.

Marshall and Warren, who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for proving the heretical theory that H. pylori caused ulcers come to mind.

As does an employee of the Swiss patent office named Einstein whose scientific papers were widely ridiculed for years by the scientific establishment until proven correct.

Here is the story (I may write a post about this):

…while [Wegener's] ideas attracted a few early supporters such as Alexander Du Toit from South Africa and Arthur Holmes in England, the hypothesis was generally met with skepticism. The one American edition of Wegener’s work, published in 1924, was received so poorly that the American Association of Petroleum Geologists organized a symposium specifically in opposition to the continental drift hypothesis. Also its opponents could, as did the Leipziger geologist Franz Kossmat, argue that the oceanic crust was too firm for the continents to “simply plow through”. In 1943 George Gaylord Simpson wrote a vehement attack on the theory (as well as the rival theory of sunken land bridges) and put forward his own permanantist views. Alexander du Toit wrote a rejoinder in the following year, but such was G.G.Simpson’s influence that even in countries previously sympathetic towards continental drift, like Australia, Wegener’s hypotheis fell out of favour.

In the early 1950s, the new science of paleomagnetism pioneered at Cambridge University by S. K. Runcorn and at Imperial College by P.M.S. Blackett was soon throwing up data in favour of Wegener’s theory. By early 1953 samples taken from India showed that the country had previously been in the Southern hemisphere as predicted by Wegener. By 1959, the theory had enough supporting data that minds were starting to change, particularly in the United Kingdom where, in 1964, the Royal Society held a symposium on the subject.

There is also Lister, as well as many of the early pioneers of germ theory, vaccination, and anesthesia.

As I said, I may do some research on this and write a post. Those are just the ones that quickly come to mind. There are many more, I believe, but I don’t have time to look them up right now.

I have some time on science discussion boards where some very agile scientific minds debate the human-generated theory of global warming, as well as the extent of global warming itself. I have been impressed by the quality of the arguments on both sides.