Josh Marshall on the Climate Science Denialists

I thought this an excellent plainspoken editorial.

[T]o maintain a skepticism which is rooted in the inherently tentative nature of all scientific knowledge is quite different from assuming that the science is wrong and that what's right is what I'd prefer to be true even though I don't know anything about the science at all...

[M]edical science today clearly has only a very limited understanding of cancer. But how many oncology skeptics do you know who choose to take a pass on chemo or radiation if they get sick?

I can't say that I really have any sophisticated understanding of the science of climate change…. For me, the fact that the vast majority of people with specialized knowledge in the field think there's a problem is good enough for me.

Put baldly like that, perhaps it suggests a certain incuriousness. But I can't be knowledgeable about everything. And I'm comfortable with the modern system in which the opinions of really knowledgeable people with expertise counts more in cases like this than people who know nothing at all...

[T]here's inevitable uncertainty about how such a complex system as the global climate functions. But in our own lives, in the real world, we live in a science based world. It's the premise on which almost everything rests. And pretty much everyone assumes that cell phones will work, bombs will go off, medical treatments will give us the best chance of survival. Only this one example is different.

I daresay some of the climate-science denialists might be folks who would prefer to go to faith-healers or acupuncturists than oncologists, but Marshall's larger point is still an excellent one. Like the hired flacks who flogged "safe cigarettes" to protect the profits of the palpably death-dealing tobacco industry for as long as possible, a huge amount of denialist rhetoric is just the evil cynical opportunism of terrible people. It is no surprise that corporate-militarists would try to game the system through which well-informed citizens are compelled to trust certified experts simply because we all of us depend for our survival and flourishing on applications of technoscientific knowledges which no one citizen can fully comprehend on their own specialized terms. Gaming systems they nonetheless count on to function even while they are zealously undermining them is just a special case of the basic lie-cheat-steal ethos of which Movement Republicanism now most essentially consists.