Education Quote by David Douglass

Credentialing is a weapon here, and David Douglass knows it. By opening with "As a physicist", he’s not merely identifying his job title; he’s staking a claim to gatekeeping authority in a dispute where public audiences often treat science as a team sport. The sentence is engineered to puncture the rhetorical shield of a petition: the impressive-sounding list of signatories, the implied consensus, the vague aura of expertise. Douglass doesn’t argue the substance yet. He attacks the scaffolding that props the substance up.

The surgical move is the distinction between being a physicist and working "in this field". It’s a rebuke to the lazy syllogism that any scientist can speak credibly on any technical domain. In climate and energy debates especially, lists of PhDs get circulated like talismans; Douglass is saying the relevant unit of expertise is not the diploma but the publication trail. "Has ever published a paper" is the real dagger. Peer-reviewed work is the currency of competence, and he’s calling their pockets empty.

The subtext is also defensive: he anticipates a public that will be swayed by sheer numbers (18!) and counters with insider norms. "To my knowledge" adds a careful scientific caveat while still landing the accusation; it reads as restrained, but it functions as a challenge: show me the receipts.

Contextually, this is intra-science boundary policing in response to a "Statement" designed for political or media traction. Douglass is trying to drag the argument back from headline consensus to domain-specific credibility, where claims live or die by demonstrated work, not signatures.