The link between science denial and conspiracy theorism has been obvious to scientists for years. Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, for example, was one of the first to know it was real, long before anyone had found the slightest evidence of it—a search that continues to this day.

Take BBD, one of the blogosphere’s most vocal and indefatigable opponents of science (despite lacking any qualifications therein). He believes we’re all being lied to by a “machine” that operates, naturally enough, “behind the scenes”:

This is what I mean when I say that the denial industry has constructed a false narrative for contrarians to karaoke. Misdirection, false equivalence and dogmatism are central to it all and it needs to be shut out of public discourse because it is a fundamental distortion of the truth. If more were publicly known about the contrarian spin machine, its outputs would be less tolerated by the public and (more) policy makers. Perhaps it’s not the science that needs better communication, but the dishonest tactics of the misinformation industry. IMO, people do not realise what is going on behind the scenes and that is the greatest ‘communication’ problem of the lot.

UPDATE: Or Does He?

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When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
“These are their reasons. They are natural.”
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.

Someone called Karl Pilkington has been doing the rounds of the climate avoidosphere with the latest in a long tradition of lateral-thinking geo-engineering dodges:

They keep saying that sea levels are rising an’ all this. It’s nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it’s because there’s too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science.

Now I’d never heard of Dr Pilkington (or his co-author Ricky Gervais for that matter) before, and a quick search of Google Scholar reveals no previous contributions to the peer-reviewed literature on climate change, its causes and its impacts—but then, since when have the ignoratii been sticklers for scientific credibility?

The dangerous thing about this sort of solution is not that it couldn’t possibly work but the opposite: it is physically plausible, and therefore seductive. It perfectly exemplifies the lure (sorry!) of the easy fix.

In fact, you might even call proposals like Pilkington’s… deeply irresponsible.

LOL!

I know, I know—but the pun was begging to be made. If you’re one of those people who consider the subject of climate change too important for humor, I’ve got three words to say to you:

I sincerely apologize.

Anyway, back to the topic. As long as the problems of climate change can be averted relatively painlessly, we’ll always have an excuse to put off the painful but necessary task which the science devolves upon us: punishing the fossil-fuel multinationals, their executive officers and the other owners of Big Capital.

We are, therefore, dealing here with escapism of the most reckless kind. Principles like academic freedom and tenure are all well and good in peacetime, but not in an existential debate like the non-existent debate about climate change. The universities and institutions associated with Prof. Pilkington need to state, loudly and clearly, that he does not speak for them.

Dear denialatus / denialata,

Have you read the latest IPCC report?

I have. I’ve seen the science. And it’s not good.

Species stress. Ocean neutralization. Deep-ocean warming as rapid as ever since measurements began.

Increased risk of drought and/or precipitation. Human-caused wildfires in Australia. Glaciers continuing to melt, causing major river systems. Weather predicted to become less and less predictable. Armed conflict in Africa. A century of gender equality at risk in the Middle East. Diseases once safely confined to Africa now threatening developed populations to the North.

I’m not a climate scientist. So I don’t pretend to be competent to interpret the evidence. All I can do is interpret the interpretation given to it by the world’s leading policy, government, political, economic and scientific minds, who’ve painstakingly filtered and vetted every sentence in what is probably the thickest, densest collaboration in modern science.

You might prefer to latch on to isolated mistakes in a thousand-page-plus document—as if false predictions somehow, magically, falsify an entire theory. I’m pretty sure that’s not how science works, but hey, you clearly know better.

You might focus disproportionately on the growing uncertainties, as if what we don’t know can’t hurt us. But uncertainty is not your friend! Far from it—if the scientists are absolutely confident of anything, it’s that the unknowns will turn out to be even worse than the knowns. To make things worse, climate scientists say they know less and less about what nature is going to throw at us. (Which is just science doing what science does: incrementally chipping away at human knowledge.)

As the science gets worse and worse, my question to everyone who’s in denial is:

How bad does the science have to get before we do something to stop it?

At what point do you finally join the rest of us in demanding urgent, significant cuts?

Trying to have a Civil Discussion™ at wottsupwiththat today, I knew it was only a matter of time before my climate entourage showed up, turned it into another thread about me and begged Wottsy to shut it down because “this is turning into another thread about Brad.”

So that was no surprise.

But something ‘BBD’ told me got me thinking. It reminded me of a phenomenon that’s been bugging me for a while now.

“For all his show of surface intelligence,” said Born Believer Dominic, “Brad is demonstrably incapable of understanding that the consensus arises from the evidence but is not part of it.”

Here’s the thing: I’m accused of seeming smart all the time.

Yesterday, for example, the worst insult my critics could come up with with was that I “like the sound of [my] own brilliance.“

OK, admittedly that was just BBD again (who went on to describe my brilliance as deafening, drawing further attention to his confusion between the photic and the phonic).

But other people have been telling me the same thing. For years. At Deltoid I was condemned as a “[W]underkind.” At school I was tediously scolded as a “smartass”, while my peers were praised as “dumbasses.”

Why do people keep saying how intelligent I seem—and how do I make them stop?

What’s your secret, BBD?