Denial machine

Orson Scott Card recently lost it over climate change:

Global warming is, in other words, somewhere between Piltdown Man and cold fusion on the scale of fake science. But when I say this, the true believers become angry. Not because they can contradict my statements -- they can't. Every word I just wrote is consonant with the evidence as it now stands. They become angry because Global Warming has become the vengeful, punitive deity of a new fundamentalism: Fanatical Environmentalism. Global Warming is rather like the idea of biblical infallibility or creation science -- impervious to evidence or logic.

He's wrong, of course. Climate "truthers" have to rely on manufactured evidence and spin to bolster their claims.

The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real ... It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

Big Oil recycled Big Tobacco naysayers into climate naysayers.

Conspiracy theorists on the left in the US deny that Saudi hijackers were responsible for 9/11, and conspiracy theorists on the right in the US deny that global warming is happening. Both of them are railing against authorities, be it government or scientists, that they both discount and distrust. It's as if they are merely collectively disagreeing over which threat to deny, be it the global warming or terrorism.