I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but in the U.S. there is a group of people who feel "with every fiber of their being" that that governments should be weak and should not be able to "tell private citizens what to do."
Anyone should be able to do anything he wants to do so long as he doesn't punch someone else in the nose, so to speak. That is their starting position and their end position.
This conviction drives everything they think they know about science and how it works - first they make their political decision and then they go about trying to justify their belief with science - elevating any bit of "information" they hear that supports their view and rejecting outright whatever disagrees. Simultaneously, they assert that the actual scientists are just trying to justify governments controlling the world.
One of my friends pointed me to an article by Gary Sutton in Forbes yesterday. The gist of the article was that scientists USED TO be absolutely certain that we were going to get global cooling. However, this is a red herring:
http://www.youtube.com/potholer54#p/search/0/EU_AtHkB4MsIn any case, the Sutton article was otherwise seriously flawed:
Mr. Sutton quoted the NSB in two ways that made it appear that they said something they didn't say:
1) He made it appear that NSB were very certain of their results when they weren't; and
2) He left out the crucial point in the very next sentence indicating human interference could alter the observed pattern.
Here's the original quote you can't find in the article.
"Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading into the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now."
And here's the part he left out (very next sentence):
"However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path."
I also tried to check on the quote he used from Science about predicting "a full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," but there is no issue for March 1, 1975. I tried searching "full-blown" and "ice age" on ebsco-host for the entire month @ Science, but no luck. I'm now browsing JSTOR which is tedious, but would be easier if Mr. Sutton had provided a citation instead of a vague (and incorrect) reference. My best guess is that he has mangled whatever was in the article. (In fact, he refers to Science, but was it in a letter to the editor, an editorial, an actual article? We don't know and Mr Sutton doesn't care or appear to know the difference.)
Already this article is being cited frequently around the net - these guys get hold of this tripe and unthinkingly spread it around.
Of course, he ends with the obligatory "Carthagia delenda est" talking about how the recent climate-gate scandal shows the whole thing is a hoax. No surprise that a denialist with such a sterling record in the rest of his article would be poking the equine - with a wet noodle.
As with other kinds of denialists, these particular denialists don't actually care what the facts are. They don't want people to stop and think. They want action - as quickly and as unthinkingly as is humanly possible.
