I say this with the greatest affection. Jeff Bingaman is a wonk.

From Cornelia Dean’s story in yesterday’s New York Times on a briefing on Capitol Hill attempting to explain what science is:

(T)he briefing’s subject apparently struck a chord. More than 100 committee staff members, Congressional aides and at least one senator, Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, crammed into a basement meeting room.

Well down in a tortuous thread, a commenter asks why a new and different explanation for surface warming of our planet is not being considered in our ongoing global discussion of climate change.

I won’t begin to try to detail the explanation, but at the risk of being unfairly pejorative in my description of it, I’ll simply say that the only place it seems to show up is on a Geocities page and in the frankly marginal journal Energy and Environment. (By “marginal,” I mean that E&E is not a scientific journal at all, is not peer reviewed by scientists, and is, by the editor’s admission, a vehicle for her political agenda.)

In my work as a science journalist I am frequently confronted with ideas of this sort. They involve a bright individual who approaches me with an insight that suggests that the conventional scientific understanding of some question – gravity is the most common – is completely wrong. Sometimes it’s the scientist him or herself that approaches me, and sometimes an enthusiastic supporter.

It is possible that these new ideas will turn out to be useful. But invariably, upon scrutiny by a scientist with expertise in the field (remember I am not that person), they turn out to have missed or misunderstood something fundamental.

It is my way to try to be polite. As a journalist, I have an obligation to listen to as many people with as many different ideas as I can. But there has to be a cutoff point, or I’d waste a lot of time on this stuff. Here’s my simple way of triaging: has this new idea gained any traction in the scientific community? If it hasn’t, then I’m not going to waste much time on it.

Four years ago, at an American Physical Society meeting, I listened to a talk by Los Alamos physicist Emil Mottola offering a radically different explanation for how black holes work. After the talk, one of the physicists in the audience followed him into the hall excitedly and said, in essence, “I think you’re completely wrong, but this is really interesting!” And a cheerfully spirited exchange ensued. If the statistical proporties governing radical new scientific ideas are to be believed, the odds clearly favor Mottola being wrong. But at least he’s out there gaining some small amount of traction among the folks working on the question.

Life is short, and there are far more than enough useful challenges to the scientific orthodoxy that do gain enough traction to be interesting to spend time on those that don’t.