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I believe this attitude stems from many decades ago when "scientists" assured us that smoking was OK, that DDT was OK, CFCs were safe and numerous other instances of products, materials, chemicals etc, that were patently NOT safe, being passed by the 'boffins'.
Then the opposite happened - EVERYTHING was bad, from the perfectly benign preservatives in your tinned spaghetti to, of all things EGGS!
Eggs for god sake!
I've never heard of anyone dying from eating an egg.
My faith in 'Science' has been very much eroded by having worked in the scientific community!
Jealousies and rivalries are rife. Results are regularly skewed if not out-right fabricated and replicable experimental outcomes have been replaced by "estimates" and "models" that have dubious predictive value and are based on specious reasoning and logical fallacies, Unfortunately, these are touted as substantive and inarguable, particularly if they reflect public prejudice.
While my degree is in economics, a fair amount of that 'dismal science' is statistical analysis and I know 'good' stats from 'bad'.
Much of the analysis and modelling coming from universities and institutes (government and non) is so badly flawed from the word 'go' that it is effectively useless.
Yet, as it panders to political and popular prejudices it is given the legitimacy of numbers - the more people that say its true, the truer it must be!
The climate-change industry is particularly bad for this. A chap on the radio the other day avowed that if 99 scientists agreed on an issue and one disagreed, he could legitimately thought insane!!
Lister? Gallileo?
Another cause for deteriorating faith in science is that so defensive are scientists of their theories and careers, that even in the face of contrary evidence (string theory?!) they would rather deny the truth themselves than admit to error.
The strident posturing visible in almost all scientific disciplines filters out to the great unread through a facile media who's sole function is to retain viewers.
The more disastrous the prediction - the more highly its defended -the better the story.
There will, alas, always be villagers with pitchforks who, despite all hard evidence, will reject anything that challenges their prejudices.
I suspect that this is the faction on which the program will focus.
But there is, I think, a larger body of people who have, with justification, been questioning the validity of much scientific research and the motives of the people who carry it out.
Aren't we all supposed to have fried to crisp by now because of the hole in the ozone layer?
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