Every culture has its lunatic fringe. Every school has its amoral ignoramus delinquents who hate learning, hate their teachers, and hate the large majority of fellow students that are much more intelligent and better informed and socially accepted than they. What is new lately is that the pathologically lying nitwit misfits, traditionally shunned or banned or finally shamed into a modicum of common sense and basic morality, are instead handed a huge worldwide soap box on which to parade their truth-hating nonsense 24-7 and globally. Yahoo Answers is one of many sites that are, in many practical senses, tailor-made to help these anti-intellectual hoodlums sabotage civilized discourse, democratic institutions, and interests of ordinary honest and well-behaved members of society.
Addictive lying about the science of long term global climate change is almost a perfect bandwagon onto which such renegade peanut-brain sheep can herd:
1) The science is new, it would not have been covered at all in the modicum of science to which most of the geezer anti-science ringleaders of climate-change deniers would have been exposed.
2) The science is relatively complicated. One needs to know something about mathematical scale, about fractions and percentages, about the difference between stocks and flows, between short-term fluctuations and long-term trends, about probabilities and insurance.
3) The science is counterintuitive. Why should a trace gas effect global temperature, how can a few degree average long term global temperature affect global climate, and how can a changing climate radically change almost every ecosystem and nearly every sector of the global economy, and in profound and mostly but certainly not always, seriously negative ways?
4) The effects of anthropogenic global climate chance are diffuse, long-term, and have multiple other causes.
5) One of the biggest and most powerful set of economic institutions, the global fossil fuel industry stands to lose TRILLIONS of dollars in future revenues if serious action is taken to reduce a century-long economic addiction to their products. For farthings on the dollar, those companies have invested in setting up a self-replicating anti-science machine to bamboozle the public and corrupt its political leadership.
6. All that is required, for this anti-science machine to have significant effect, is for nitwit misfits, and the politicians catering to those truth-hating moral outcasts and funded by the fossil fuel firms, to systematically deny a century of massive science, the conclusions of every major science academy worldwide for decades, the teachings of every significant science textbook, and university science department, the findings endorsed by nearly every Nobel laureate in science, the conclusions of every major global insurance company, and the overwhelming majority of well-educated people everywhere in the world for many years. But, being stupid and lying like blazes has never much bothered expellees from public schools, inmates at asylums and criminal detention facilities, or crooked con artists and politicians.
U.S. National Academy of Sciences, 2010:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12782&page=1
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=12877
“Choices made now about carbon dioxide emissions reductions will affect climate change impacts experienced not just over the next few decades but also in coming centuries and millennia…Because CO2 in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe.”
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/awards/NAS/
“The Academy membership is composed of approximately 2,100 members and 380 foreign associates, of whom nearly 200 have won Nobel Prizes. Members and foreign associates of the Academy are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research; election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer.”
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/09/inhofe-and-crichton-together-at-last/
http://www.newsweek.com/2007/08/13/the-truth-about-denial.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-mckibben/the-great-carbon-bubble_b_1259782.html