[wfo]

I don't have a problem with skeptics. They're a healthy part of the scientific ecosystem. But as devil's advocate style checks against the consensus, challenging premises and acting in an adversarial but respectful manner.

Many of the climate change skeptics actually allege a huge conspiracy and accuse the enormous consensus of educated scientists of lying or being fundamentally incompetent, which puts them on the level of cranks that don't deserve a moment's notice. But there's a lot of money and prestige in denial, it's a huge business because the longer we deny the more money certain large companies can make. So these cranks (and the minuscule fraction of qualified honest skeptics who barely exist) get credence and money far beyond their due. They get paired off 1-on-1 with an actual scientist in the public sphere. They get asked to speak on commissions. Which is what I have a problem with.

I don't have a problem with John McAfee existing. I'd have a problem with him and Ron Rivest holding a public 'debate' about RSA to 'understand the controversy'.

And you'll notice I never mentioned second-hand smoking. Evidence has always been shaky and arguable about how much of an effect it has, it simply followed the same moral panic as the very scientific smoking evidence. And we found out we were being lied to and results were being fabricated and manipulated by extremely powerful interests about smoking, so to be on the safe side we chose to trust nothing pro-tobacco after that, a correct choice I think. A societal immune response against the cancer that infected us, if you'll pardon the appropriate analogy.

I picked smoking as an example because the evidence is incontrovertible and because it was covered up as long as possible by actively malicious corporations and lobbying groups with the intention of killing as many people as possible so that they could sell more cigarettes to unwitting innocents/children. It's a history lesson that we should give very little credence to "skeptics" who happen to always end up having connections to vested corporate interests and insist "the science just isn't settled yet" but provide no evidence to back their contrarian claims and insist that we should drag our feet. Sound familiar?