Squeak,
There is one other reason to care about respecting science: When belief about nature are driven by ideology or ignorance rather than facts, people can die. I’m not exaggerating here; people died after part of the South African government bought into the nonsense that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, and Jewish children contracted measles when parents bought into the lie (possibly spread through out and out fraud) that vaccinations cause autism. The stakes on global warming are rather high: If global warming continues unabated, hundreds of millions of people could be made homeless by rising sea levels, but if we over-react, too-stringent regulation could result in serious economic hardship. We need the best science, untainted by ideology. The discussion here is not part of the solution.