"It may not be common sense, but if common sense were good enough, we wouldn't need science."

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Notes:   'Common sense' (aka'the smell test') is often cited by science critics as more reliable than scientific inquirty ascertaining truth.    Here are two samples from "skeptical" websites:

 

"Let's take a look at global warming. First, we shall consider a "smell test" that an ordinary person can employ with the help of common sense."

"Using common sense usually works better than studying things to death. . ."

This confuses different kinds of tasks at very different scales.     While useful for quick decisions in dealings with people and other familiar things at human scale, 'common sense' is often a very poor guide to understanding phenomena that are much smaller, much larger, much faster, or much slower than we are.  

Common sense tells us that the sun revolves around the earth; you can see it moving, after all.   Common sense tells us that the earth is flat.   Common sense says the earth is solid, that the continents are not floating and moving.  

Common sense told people for centuries that "bad (i.e. smelly) air" caused cholera, not microorganisms contaminating our water.   Nor was common sense much help in discovering how to cure pneumonia, or prevent smallpox and polio.      

Common sense is of course worse than useless for predicting the behavior of sub-atomic particles, or what happens to time and space as movement approaches the speed of light.    But it isn't even much help for predicting what will happen if you try to run across a non-Newtonian fluid, such as corn starch and water,, or solving a simple probability problem, such as which doors to choose in Let's Make a Deal.   For more graphic illustrations, see Common Sense is Worthless in Science

During ten thousand years of civilization, many aspects of human material conditions did not change that much, until the birth of modern science 350 years ago, which eventually spawned the industrial revolution.  Why would we now want to discard the scientific method and go back to relying on a more primitive mental tool for answers to complex questions about geophysics?

Source:   Jocelyn Fong, Media Matters, "Forbes Still Publishing Heartland's Climate Nonsense," Media Matters 6/18/12.     Via Aaron Huertas, Press Secretary for the Union of Concerned Scientists.