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I'd say creation scientists and climate skeptics are pretty obviously wrong in a way that pretty obviously serves their interests, even if I'd believe they aren't consciously lying. And yeah the scientific establishment would probably be better served if they held to the pure truth even more strictly than they have, but over all I think they've done pretty well on those issues, as shown by how evolution/climate change are both pretty well regarded as "True." these days by most people. Now all that's debated about climate change is its exact severity/the best policies to mitigate it, as it should be.
I think it's not a good idea to model this as narrowly as scientists vs laymen. The actually place the rubber meets the road is media vs layman. And in a lot of ways this explains much of the problem. The media took a shortcut on at least the climate science area and tried to brow beat people into accepting it rather than genuinely convince and engage with pushback. I mean "an inconvenient truth" made actual real predictions that mostly been wrong and it's widely agree Gore exaggerated to shock people into action. In other words he lied. Those of us who can engage with the science despite the media know that Global warming continues as an important to address phenomenon because we can grok the actual mechanisms and see the measures. Those who only engage with the media version see that they were lied to and have reacted by hardening against further lies in that direction. Even Evolution probably suffered by being weaponized by people more interested in taking down religion than spreading knowledge in good faith.
That well read people mostly accept these things as true is the faintest possible praise for theories that are this legible.
Or, you're being fooled by a more sophisticated lie.
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That's fair. But I think there isn't an easy solution to this, because I think the media has multiple motivations for publishing alarmism. a) They think ends justify the means and that exaggerating for a noble goal is worth it. b) Alarmism just gets more clicks, getting more money in their own pocket justify the means. And c), signaling, showing off how good of an environmentalist they personally are justify the means.
Punishing people more for dishonesty and rewarding honesty more is a good general approach. But that's pretty hard to do, since while it's very easy to say "You're full of BS" to someone who says "Climate change will end human life in the next 30 years", most cases are blurrier. What do you do to a journalist who publishes an opinion piece that says "In my personal opinion, I expect climate change to do two trillion in damage to this region over a ten year period" when the most accurate estimation is that it would only do 1 trillion in damage? At that point it's just opinions and estimation, you can get a bit angry at the exaggerating journalist, but demanding they get fired or something probably wouldn't be viable.
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