In the October issue of Physics Today, Steve Sherwood discusses science controversies, past and present. He discusses heliocentrism, relativity, and greenhouses warming. Heliocentrism and relativity had supporters and opponents at the time, and of course both are taken for granted today. Sherwood, who is co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the Univ. of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, makes the analogy to global warming.
Naturally this will infuriate the rejectionists. The publication of the article signals that Physics Today is willing to publish soberly written articles that offend the rejectionists.
This is not the first time that Physics Today has published a timely article, to the great consternation of some physicists. Back in October 1989, during the controversy about Pons and Fleischman's purported discovery of cold fusion, Physics Today reprinted a 1953 article by Irving Langmuir and Robert Hall about "pathological science", including the purported discovery in 1903 of N-rays by the French physicist Rene-Prosper Blondlot.
In the case of cold fusion, Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger became a believer in 1989 and tried to publish articles with his theory of the alleged developments. When his manuscripts were rejected by APS journals, Schwinger resigned in protest from the American Physical Society. This ought to put in perspective the resignation (in September 2011) by Ivar Giaever, who resigned from the American Physical Society in protest of its position on global warming. Giaevar won a Nobel Prize in 1973 for tunneling in semiconductors, a field that is light-years away from climate change. Julian Schwinger was a talented mathematical physicist, but his expertise had nothing to do with Pons and Fleischman's cold fusion experiments.
The take-home lesson: some physicists don't always know as much as they think they do. And this is especially true for Nobel laureates. Nothing is more likely to encourage delusions of omniscience than receipt of a Nobel prize.
And if you think Giaever's beliefs are weird, check out the beliefs of his co-Nobel prize winner, Brian Josephson, who is an enthusiastic believer in parapsychology.