Are There Areas In Which Scientists Simply Can’t Be Trusted?

Astronomers have discovered over 2000 exoplanets, some of which have a startling resemblance to our Earth.  Cancer patients are twice as likely to survive for a decade or more than they were 40 years ago. Today, your cell phone has more computing power in it than every piece of hardware in NASA combined, back in 1969 when it sent two astronauts to the moon.

Perhaps as a result of all this demonstrable success, no one challenges science when it tells us that we’re going to experience an eclipse or be hit by a hurricane. But when it comes to climate change, these same scientists are often viewed as pawns of a band of elite and amoral socialists, pressured into bowing to climate dogma at pain of ridicule, social ostracism, and funding cuts.

Does that strike you as perhaps a bit odd?  Wouldn’t common sense suggest that the same academic rigor and integrity that sent the spacecraft Cassini on a 13-year-long tour of Saturn could be trusted to report the truth about what’s happening here on Earth?

The answer: it might, but it tends not to.

The reason: The acceptance of the concept of human-caused climate change is so terrifying to our world’s most powerful interests that it has spawned a cottage industry of junk journalism whose only purpose is to sew doubt on the subject into the minds of millions of Americans.  And they’re powerfully good at, too.  Folks who freely admit that they know absolutely nothing about space exploration, oncology or IT are quite confident in offering their opinions on the nature and scope of climate change: that it could be caused by volcanoes or solar flares, that the climate on Mars changes too, that the science isn’t settled, and that there is a difference between “good” and “bad” science (and that this global warming stuff is most definitely a case of the latter).

This isn’t an accident. It takes hard work to get millions of people, albeit largely uneducated people, to challenge the work of thousands of professional climate scientists carrying Ph.D.s who have spent decades studying this phenomenon.  The people behind all this may not be honest or good human beings, but they certainly are fantastically good at what they do.