Call it hubris, overreach, “operating outside your area of expertise” or whatever else you like, but bad things can happen when somebody who is an expert in one field makes decisions or acts in another field.
Walter Russell Mead has an excellent in-depth article on this phenomenon in the context of the global warming argument. It is all good and as a result it is very difficult to find a small portion to excerpt as a tease to get you over there to read it.
Nonetheless, here is a bit, but you really must read it all.
The real and lasting damage that the green movement sustained in the last eight months has been the revelation that it is strategically and politically incompetent. It adopted a foolish grand strategy (a global treaty by unanimous consent) and attempted to stampede the world to agreement by hyping the science and whooping the treaty through. That was never going to work; the green movement today is living with the bitter consequences of its strategic blindness.
The problem is real; therefore my solution is right: that is the faulty logic behind the Green Lie, and it is exactly the tired old lie of the Prohibitionists and the peace quacks. Alcohol abuse, war, nuclear weapons and excessive emission of greenhouse gasses are all bad. Those facts, however, do not make Prohibition, the Kellog-Briand Pact, the nuclear freeze or the Big Green treaty movement smart, effective or good.
History is brutal and unforgiving; good intentions are no excuse. The nobler the cause, the worse the betrayal. Precisely because a growing body of science points to the existence of some serious concerns about climate, we must think carefully and clearly. Malthusian panic attacks alternating with utopian dreams of universal accords, anti-growth politics and anti-capitalist resentments dressed up as environmentalism aren’t going to help us.