I'm not exactly sure what you mean when you say 'who's the authority?'  Who's the authority when Democrats say "global warming is a reality"?  For that matter, who's the authority on whether boats can fall off the edge of the world if one sails too far?  

Some things are considered settled by science, and the very strong explanatory power of statistics when practiced responsibly is one of them.  Maybe as a trained statistician my bias is showing, but while in specific scenarios one should always be skeptical of statistical analysis, to mistrust it in general and doubt its ability to make strong conclusions is no different than mistrusting the veracity of evolution.  One should question individual purveyors of bad stats, rather than the field as a whole.  This isn't one blogger's opinion, this is the established consensus of science.

The bottom line is, there's only one political party dedicated to undermining science and I'm pretty sure it's not mine.