Michael Lavine, a statistician from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has performed a very polite savaging of Naomi Oreskes over at Stats.org. Here's an excerpt:
After urging scientists to adopt a threshold less stringent than 95 percent in the case of climate change, [Oreskes says]:
WHY don’t scientists pick the standard that is appropriate to the case at hand, instead of adhering to an absolutist one? The answer can be found in a surprising place: the history of science in relation to religion. The 95 percent confidence limit reflects a long tradition in the history of science that valorizes skepticism as an antidote to religious faith. Even as scientists consciously rejected religion as a basis of natural knowledge, they held on to certain cultural presumptions about what kind of person had access to reliable knowledge. One of these presumptions involved the value of ascetic practices. Nowadays scientists do not live monastic lives, but they do practice a form of self-denial, denying themselves the right to believe anything that has not passed very high intellectual hurdles.
Yes, most scientists are skeptics. We do not accept claims lightly, we expect proof, and we try to understand our subject before we speak publicly and admonish others.
Thank goodness.