Can Climate Scientists Be Trusted?

One of my favorite high school teachers, Joe Turk, makes this remark: Scientists allowed us to watch live (with a time delay caused by 40 million miles) a rover land on Mars. But some people won’t believe them about climate change.

Yes, this is a terrible shame, and it may be precisely this that ultimately condemns the inhabitants of this planet to a terrible future.

There is one obvious force behind this.  Where there is no wealthy industry group that benefits from blocking the exploration of Mars, there is an enormous sector (energy) that gains from delaying the mitigation of climate change as long as possible.  The continuation of the consumption of fossil fuels indefinitely into the future is a boon to the most profitable enterprise in human history.

The gigantic mass of undereducated Americans makes perfect fodder for the largest, Big Oil-driven propaganda machine the world has ever seen, and there is no limit to the directions their lies can take:

Renewable energy/The Green New Deal/cleantech can be variously billed as unAmerican, unreliable, too expensive, anti-capitalistic, driven by the “radical left” (that hates America), harmful to the environment, a job-killer, responsible for the debacle in Texas, viable only with government subsidies, and reliant on the religion of climate change.

Climate science can be tossed off as junk and corrupt, and its practitioners can be accused of being forced to toe the line inside their respective institutions, or accepting grant money to study something that doesn’t exist.

What was bad four years ago became far worse with the entrance of Donald Trump onto the American political scene.  Now we had the most powerful person on Earth telling his largely uneducated supporters that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese to ruin the U.S. economy, and the entirety of the Republican party following him in lockstep.  Now we have the politicization of what was formally a scientific discipline, which, by definition, is about determining the truth regardless of its implications.

At this point we have almost half the U.S. electorate thinking the same thing about climate science as they do about liberals, political correctness, pandemic lockdowns and Dr. Fauchi, universal healthcare, socialism, hand-outs, gender neutrality, Planned Parenthood, immigration reform, the current state of election security, the Deep State, college professors, and gun control.

Now, we need to be clear that divisions occur universally on matters of opinion: art, food, sports, and above all, politics.  Fortunately, however, the United States is the only nation on Earth in which they exist on matters of science.