No it wasn’t a deniers conference. It was a bunch of distinguished scientists and engineers trying to understand something and surprised that other people, mostly politicians and journalists purported to have the answers to the questions they were trying so hard to understand. The problem was that they knew the difficulties; and that facile answers that satisfied the lay public didn’t begin to satisfy them.

But the problem was that some alchemy had transformed the whole standard process of inquiry into an act of blasphemy. I suppose you had to go back to Galileo to find an analogy. Someone had succeeded to the Inquisition. It was back in other robes. The term “denier” captures the religious character of the public debate.