Many of the critics of climate science don’t really understand science itself as a process or as a culture that well.
There’s an excellent elementary tutorial here that captures much of what many people are missing. I especially appreciate this breath of fresh air:
The Scientific Method is traditionally presented in the first chapter of science textbooks as a simple recipe for performing scientific investigations. Though many useful points are embodied in this method, it can easily be misinterpreted as linear and “cookbook”: pull a problem off the shelf, throw in an observation, mix in a few questions, sprinkle on a hypothesis, put the whole mixture into a 350° experiment — and voila, 50 minutes later you’ll be pulling a conclusion out of the oven! That might work if science were like Hamburger Helper®, but science is complex and cannot be reduced to a single, prepackaged recipe.
This site is a project of the University of California Museum of Paleontology and is the result of collaboration among a diverse group of scientists, teachers, designers, and web experts.
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I thought this was an excellent comic/graphic depiction of the scientific method: http://i.imgur.com/K97Fk.png
[ +1; do you know whom to credit? -mt ]