How is that Google's job?

TFA: People who deny global warming, oppose the Darwinian account of evolution, refuse to see the causal link between HIV and AIDS, and think that 9/11 was an inside job have put the Internet to great use. Initially, the Internet helped them find and recruit like-minded individuals and promote events and petitions favorable to their causes. However, as so much of our public life has shifted online, they have branched out into manipulating search engines, editing Wikipedia entries, harassing scientists who oppose whatever pet theory they happen to believe in, and amassing digitized scraps of "evidence" that they proudly present to potential recruits.

Conspiracy nuts will also carefully cling to the fact that any given scientific study has a small chance of being incorrect. They'll look at something like the MIT Integrated System Model projections and cling to the lower bound estimate, which notes that there is about a 5% chance that even under 'business as usual', anthropogenic warming will not exceed +3K by 2100. (For calibration, a +3K shift over that time frame falls under 'expensive but manageable' in most of the economic indicators, though it does put a lot of strain on fresh water resources.) They'll post a link to some blog that claims that some guy said in a newspaper (or better yet, another blog) that the model in question might have a flaw in it, and throw out the conclusions.

What they will never, ever consider is that multiple, independent lines of inquiry arrive at similar conclusions: in the case of temperature, +3K to +7K by 2100 covers the 95% confidence limits for most projections. This is common across estimates made by private nonpartisan think tanks, government agencies in multiple countries, professional organizations like the APS, and university groups. It's supported by literally hundreds of primary studies, reported in journals run by private companies, government agencies, and professional consortiums, published in countries all over the world.

Then what will really cook your noodle is how these conspiracy nuts believe simultaneously in crazily improbable 'what ifs' on a wide range of unrelated topics. As TFA notes, there's a tremendous overlap between the climate change deniers, 9/11 Troofers, the UN black helicopters crowd, UFOs, etc. I recently saw one of the Fark climate deniers seriously defend both a secret cure for all cancer (kept down by a pharma conspiracy) as well as 'suppressed' evidence that Jesus vaporized in a burst of super-high-energy photons on his death, leaving a radiation signature burned into the Shroud of Turin that scientists are still covering up. Believing that the whole of modern scientific knowledge is wrong on any one of these is a tremendous stretch. Believing that science is wrong on all of these topics says much more about them than it does about science.

Yes, some people laughed at Einstein. But they laughed a lot more at Bozo the Clown, and there are a lot more clowns than Einsteins out there, especially on the Internet.

I blame The Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the saucer people, under the supervision of the reverse vampires.

Information wants to be free.

wambu: 4. That doc who said h. pylori causes ulcers was considered a nutjob.

For a couple years after their big papers came out in 1983-1984, maybe. Human pathology trials take time to do, and have a large number of potentially confounding variables, so there is good reason to doubt an outlier finding until confirmation appears. It also turns out that most people have Helicobacter pylori in their gut, but most people never or rarely show symptoms. By 1987, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial essentially saying the jury is out, and more study is needed to resolve the question. By 1990 or so, the Marshall/Warren theory was the majority view, because the follow-up studies gradually confirmed the original findings. Here's a review by CSICOP.

That's a lot different than the autism scare, where one paper (since retracted) claimed something unusual, and was rapidly debunked by follow-up work. It's also a lot different than the literature on anthropogenic climate change .

And all of that is orders of magnitude different from alien abductions, Creationism, the Shroud of Turin, ESP, etc., which never had evidence to begin with. There's nothing inherently unreasonable about a vaccine hypothetically causing developmental problems, but it happens to not be true. If it was, science could accommodate that new knowledge-- we're certainly aware of other substances that induce neurological disabilities, and a logical mechanism exists. Something like 'ghosts haunt my house' would require essentially throwing out modern physics to accommodate it.

dervish16108: Has anyone ever seen a well-designed, credible looking conspiracy theory website before?

Very Quiet

/Sounds like one, but it's actually just a great news aggregator

heinrich66: It's also interesting to note how certain parties are tagging 9/11 "truthers" as 9/11 "deniers". As if it is in the same category as Holocaust denial.

It really is the same category. "Denier" is used to label people who have been made aware of copious evidence, but pursue a contrary ideology regardless. It's not reserved for one particular field of knowledge.