Expertise used to mean something. Now, anyone who’s read a few blogs thinks they’re qualified to evaluate science. This is also enabled by deliberate campaigns to cast expert communities as “biased” “echo chambers.”
No joke, I’ve seen climate deniers use their lack of a job in the field as an advantage over scientists, because they “have more time to evaluate thousands of arguments.”
This is disengenous, because 1) it implies we’re not keeping up with a dynamic field, 2) they’re almost never engaging directly with primary literature. It’s a circulatory dialogue via blogs and tweets.
It also reveals a lot about deniers’ motives. Foundational knowledge in the Earth system or statistics don’t matter when you approach climate change as a chess game. It’s all about semantic strategy and playing “gotcha.” It’s intellectually dishonest and, frankly, cowardly.
None of which matters, of course, because, unlike true, traditional skeptics, a denier’s goal is not to seek truth by questioning. It’s to further a political agenda (ironically, the very thing deniers accuse scientists of doing).
This is also apparent in the predictability of climate denier arguments. It’s always the same tired talking points recited from the same, tired playbook. It doesn’t matter if you refute them with detailed, well-cited arguments—they move to the next play.
Ultimately, climate deniers are playing a war of attrition. They don’t care about making the science stronger (which is why I don’t call them “skeptics). They want scientists to stop talking; failing that, they aim to discredit us with personal attacks.
Always ask yourself: who benefits from the death of expertise? @NaomiOreskes and @ErikMConway lay this out really pointedly in Merchants of Doubt, a must-read that provides important context to how we got here, when it comes to climate change.
