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The following is excerpted from a longer report that James Hansen has just posted here. The excerpt appears under the heading "How Science Works" in the original:

How Science Works

by James Hansen

One of the books about Richard Feynman (can’t find it now) has a story something like this. When he started to work at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project he was essentially a post-doc. In an early meeting, led by one of the physics giants of the first half of the century, they were discussing possible interpretations of some data. One possibility was described and seemed to Feynman to be clearly correct, but they continued to go through many alternative suggestions and Feynman was getting more and more antsy: why didn’t the leader restate the evidence for the logical interpretation? Eventually the leader stood up and said something to the effect “o.k., it seems that so-and-so’s explanation is still best, let’s get to work.”