John Carney over at the Green Sheet [via Tom Nelson]:

Very often people utter the most important truths of their careers when they near retirement. The owl of Minerva flies at twilight in part because people with most of their lives behind them have little to lose by voicing controversial points.
So it’s worth paying attention to the retirement interview of Thomas Bouchard in the journal Science. Bouchard is the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart. His main point is that scientists are way too conformist, which means we should be far more skeptical of “scientific consensus” than we are. Bouchard is primarily thinking about differences between race and sex, but his analysis applies to a vast territory of scientific inquiry.
The consensus of climatologists about “global warming” certainly seems a ripe candidate for error-prone conformism. It’s not really possible to become a climatologist if you are a global warming skeptic, which means the consensus is self-reinforcing.

Read the rest here.