This is a big part of the issue. Not only with the sound of 3,000,000 heads exploding but with the long term ramifications of “flip flopping”. Pundits and politicians can never admit they are wrong because their “enemies” will use that “flip flop” as a tool to discredit every other opinion the person has. When any point of contention arises, the “enemy” will say “ya, but remember when you were all anti AGW then you changed your mind?” as if the ability to change one’s opinion in the face of new information is a sign that they cannot be trusted.

This happens with normal people was well. They get so lost in the left/right, religious/agnostic, liberal/conservative debate that they just “tote the party line” rather than examining not only the facts, but what they really feel about the subject. As if deferring to the “other side” on any subject chips away at the foundation of their beliefs.

As issues become more mature, people learn and grow, and new information arises shouldn’t it be considered a virtue to be able to modify your stance not a weakness?

“If you’re committed to opposing nuclear power, you will drive up the estimates of death from Chernobyl. If you’re a fan of nuclear power, you’ll be inherently skeptical of really high Chernobyl death counts. And you’ll “reason” accordingly.”

1. How do keep going if there isn’t something better that does not suck so much?
2. How do I keep everything in the world from always changing for the worst?

For each question science has no answers. In fact science – which doesn’t start with the proposition that I am horrible *or* that change is bad – has no motivation to cross the line of demarcation into non-science. But into this ‘vacuum’ rushes a storybook from the friend in church that reads and recommends such storybooks. They don’t even need to read the book. In fact, the low WORDSUM score of the average Glenn Beck book purchaser combined with the average length an adult spends on the toilet reading Glenn Beck predicts that no one actually reads these books anyway.

But there the book sets on your coffee table and screams at you that the science is never certain enough to believe because it keeps changing all the time. Unlike the iron age texts.

What I believe but cannot prove – these folks really, actually do believe in climate change. They are not fools who cannot tell that the weather is getting weirder every year. They know this. What they do not know is who can fix it without changing *anything* that could cost them money and peace of mind. Just imagine that Bill O’Reilly wakes up tomorrow and just *knows* that AGW is real. Who can he put on the air that could talk about the subject without the sound of 3,000,000 heads exploding? That would be a ratings nightmare.

Leading, of course, to media coverage.

Don’t tease. What, you got an advance copy of a 2012 candidate’s book or something? Some report about geographically-linked preventable infant mortality about to drop?