Anti-intellectualism, knee-jerk negativity and credulous swallowing of bogus conspiracy theories are not skepticism, do severe harm, and should be attacked whenever they present themselves.
The other problem is that people have worked themselves into a blind seething rage of contempt at ALL scientists because of global warming; you can’t have a thread about a discovery at CERN or some astronomer discovering a new black hole without people posting the same anti-global warming rant they’ve posted a billion times before, and then going on to mock the scientists (in a COMPLETELY different field than climatology) that the original article was discussing.
Science is a pretty big field and pretty specialized, with very specific training that often isolates fairly unrelated fields.
And even within meteorology it’s hardly true there’s a universal GW agenda. Every time the yearly hurricane activity forecast comes out people fall all over themselves to attack it and its authors, and usually make the claim that they are basing their activity forecast on “global warming.”
Most operational (day-to-day or perhaps looking months ahead) mets I know cringe every time a specific weather disaster is linked to Global Warming. Bill Gray and his group that have long done hurricane season forecasts always include a section in their full forecast (that is rarely read) specifically stating that the increased hurrricane activity since 1995 has nothing to do with GW but is a decadal cycle).
And I saw the person that leads the NWS/NHC seasonal hurricane forecast in a presentation specifically shoot down a couple of young goths who were begging him to say Katrina was caused by global warming - I thought they were going to cry.
Anti-intellectualism, knee-jerk negativity and credulous swallowing of bogus conspiracy theories are not skepticism, do severe harm, and should be attacked whenever they present themselves.
Absolutely right.