Atmospheric Scientist Scott Denning Shares Lessons from Dialog with ‘Skeptics’ | The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media

“These were not a bunch of brain-washed idiots,” Denning said of the conferees, rebutting an impression many in the science community might have.
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An example of “what doesn’t work” in speaking with audiences such as those at the Heartland conference, Denning wrote, “is the condescending argument from authority that presumes that the Earth’s climate is too complicated for ordinary people to understand, so that they have to trust the opinions of experts.”

“Appeals to ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ are more likely to confirm the audience’s suspicions of some kind of nefarious conspiracy than to change minds,” Denning wrote, and “even the concept of peer review can sound sinister.”