Errrr…except that the dissenter is getting his story out in the Washington Post. I’m always amused by these major newspaper stories about the brave dissenters who think that they’re being oppressed, and that the public isn’t getting the “truth.”

But the article contains a couple of key nuggets:

“I’m strictly trying to understand the Earth as a planet,” said Hansen, who started his career studying the clouds around Venus but switched in 1978 to climate modeling.

Great. Go for it. But what makes you think that renders you a policy expert, particularly on matters that affect the national and global economy?

John Marburger, the president’s Science Advisor is quite pithy on this point:

“I take his work seriously. His work has had a big impact on this administration’s climate-change policy,” Marburger said. “But he’s not an economist. The fact that he’s a good scientist does not necessarily make him the best person to formulate policy that would affect the economy.”

That’s what most people in the policy debate miss. Kyoto and CO2 reduction enthusiasts complain that the people making the decisions don’t understand the science. But what makes them experts on all the other aspects of policy that would be affected by their nostrums?