Because it is to the point that sometimes science is wrong.
Also, it’s not that people thought DDT, Agent Orange and asbestos were great ideas, they just viewed their negatives outweighed by their positives. As for DDT, it could still be argued that the elimination of misquote born diseases such as malaria from the US far outweighed it’s negatives. Malaria was very common in the US especially in the south to include the DC area until widespread use of DDT effectively eliminated it. Then affluent white people no longer needed to worry about dying white kids so DDT was banned essentially sentencing millions of African and Asian kids to death.
Recent science has been wrong about salt intake, fat, genetic differences in races... one only needs to use Google to find many cases where science was wrong.
But the problem is that there are many questions about climate change and the science (which I might add is relatively new), and anyone who asks these questions is immediately labeled a “denier” or anti science. Ironically, the same people who lecture us about climate science then do a 180 when it comes to gender.
First, I don’t deny the existence of climate change. I grew up on an island created by glaciers.
Second, the question I and many others have is how much of an effect is actually man made and how much would naturally occur. Of the man made effect, is it bad or good? What is the “normal” we seek? Do we wish to return to days of glaciers covering half of North America? Something less than that? Some of the mini ice ages over the past several hundred years that caused world wide famine and death?
How best to achieve those goals? Personally, I believe in Maslov’s Hierarchy of human needs. The more wealth we create through free markets the more people can care about pollution. Some of the world’s worst pollution offenders are “third world” countries where people are more concerned about meeting their daily needs than pollution. Just fly into India and China and you will see it first hand. The Soviet Block was a notorious polluter.
What will the human cost be in achieving these goals versus not doing so? Again, often we hear the negative of climate change, but are longer growing seasons for crops a bad thing? Longer and harsher winters a good thing? What are normal glacier levels? Should they be static? Retreating? Advancing?
Much of the hysteria around climate change such as the kind that initiated this thread has little to do with finding ways to reduce pollution through free markets and everything to do with bringing about statism either through democratic means or, should that fail, through violent revolution.