The topic is climate change, the source was a man standing in front of a room of people saying things that are patently untrue, shared on social media by a man with a long history of posting utter tripe. The discussion doesn't need to go much further than that, for me. If what he is saying is wrong, either deliberately or otherwise, then that needs saying and it comes to an end. That doesn't mean he doesn't make other valid points, but what Patrick Moore said there is in direct contradiction to what the leading scientists of the world think and he must know that.
I don't need to debunk what Patrick Moore said, the people at the top of the climate change community did that, I agree with them because their science is in line with the evidence we have. If there was to be a new finding by somebody else we hadn't heard of, the consensus within the community would shift quicker than I could read up on it. I don't control the narrative, but that doesn't make me incapable of sorting fact from fiction.
As an example, I'll sit and watch something posted by, say, Laurence Fox. I couldn't be more of a polar opposite to him, but I'll sit and listen to whatever he says and then look up to see if what he said was true. 9 times out of 10, it's bollocks. But he would do a Lebowski and say "yeah but that's just like, your opinion man", as if having an opinion on something somehow makes you infallible. I'm not criticising him, I'm listening to the words he is saying, then looking at what the reality is. He might be the world's foremost expert on coffee, but if he is spouting off about lockdowns or transgender issues and fluffing it, then what he says will be scrutinised heavily. It shouldn't be any other way. Discussion is healthy and encourages learning, but claims and statements are a different matter because those are inherently objective and there's an understanding that if somebody is making a claim, then the evidence they provide will prove them correct. In that speech, Patrick Moore made a lot of claims without citing anybody or any kind of data. It came across like he was using "white coat syndrome", which is basically the scientific form of "trust me, bro" in that because he worked for Greenpeace, he therefore knows a lot about climate change and that demands an inherent trust in his rhetoric. Doesn't work like that.
I didn't say nobody challenged Hawking or Susskind, I said that nobody tried to debunk it, as in, nobody came in with a wild accusation, said they were lying or being misleading. Challenging is expected within the scientific community, it's the bedrock of progress, but it doesn't happen without a scientific basis. In a theoretical field this is even more important because if you don't have your ducks in a row beforehand, you're going to be pilloried from the get go because you're working with models as opposed to hard evidence. Plenty challenged both sides, but it was done from the basis of a common scientific understanding using shared principles that everybody already agreed on, it wasn't as though what Smolin came out of left field with something brand new, the divergence within the field was relatively minor and led to a healthy debate which stands to this day. That's what you hope for with all of science, but like you said, when people who aren't scientists start jumping in with their own wild claims and make it sound like they know more than they do, that's where it gets dangerous.
People pick and choose what to grift on, they tend to choose subjects that lay people don't understand at an intricate level and smarter people than them could pick apart easily, knowing that if they get enough agreement from lay people, they'll outnumber the actual scientists and turn it into a "who shouts loudest" competition. Scarily effective, actually.
