Comment Re:"and climate change deniers tout that" (Score 4, Informative) 298
I do, however, always trust in a dispassioned comparison of evidence, or at least, there's nothing I trust more.
Unfortunately, that comparison is rarely disappassionate. In fact, some recent studies have found that the "just the facts" approach to education on controversial topics tends to backfire. Among the general populace, there a high tendency to acknowledge only the facts that support a pre-existing position and the ignore the facts that contradict it.
Frankly, that's why there is an entire cottage industry built around denying something that 97% of the people researching it have concluded is true. However, that 97% may actually be low-balling the consensus, since James Powell says he's reviewed 25,182 scientific articles in peer-reveiwed journals mentioning global warming and climate change since 1991 and only 26 of them reject the anthropogenic cause. That's would be a disagreement rate of about 0.1%.
The people most qualified to evaluate the evidence seem to be in a near universal agreement that is rarely accurately represented by the media.