A comment I made on a post by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg about a piece by Paul Krugman re the denialists in the US Congress trying to vote down the Waxman-Markey bill:
It’s very interesting to see how we are facing increasing tension, in some ways, between the desire for open discussion and tolerance of a diversity of views on the one hand, and the extreme urgency for effective action on the other.
The various darker forces in this field – the professional purveyors of disinformation, such as those that have guided Senator Fielding in his recent stunt – have managed to effectively create an impression in the minds of many that there is genuine scientific debate and doubt over the fundamental aspects of AGW: that the world is warming, that human activities are responsible. An impression that is entirely false, and in many cases an impression that is created with downright fraudulent claims. “Doubt is our product”, as they say.
We literally have the infamous tobacco lawyers, and those that have learned from them, being given a voice in the media to an extent that the tobacco lobby itself has not had for decades; and yet the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is, if anything, even more overwhelmingly strong than the evidence against tobacco.
It’s a measure of our deep scientific illiteracy as a society that AGW deniers are given this extraordinary level of airtime, print space, and influence. If journalists, politicians and commentators had learned enough about the natural sciences to get a perspective on the relative weight of evidence, the situation would be very different.
How close does the Titanic have to get to the iceberg before those who loudly claim there’s no need for action are ordered off the bridge?