Science is "Natural Democracy"

I see there is another one of the periodic spates of climate change denial going on, with a rash of shares of a widely discredited Daily Mail article from 2012, and various incoherent chemtrail rants that are logically lazy to the point of being comatose being posted in social media.

It's really not difficult, guys. Science isn't some cult with a restricted membership of initiates. Science isn't about secrets and conspiracies. Science is not a racket or a private members club. Everything you need to know is freely and widely available. Everyone is a scientist if they simply apply a little bit of critical thinking and make a little bit of effort appraising evidence and inferring its logical consequences.

Is that really too much to ask?

People used to refer to science as "natural philosophy" to distinguish it from various moral and metaphysical speculations and indicate its reliance on hard experimental evidence taken from "nature". But in this day and age science and technology is so crucial to all of our activities and all of the decisions we have to make as consumers and citizens, that I would like to propose a new term. Science is "natural democracy". Democracy is not possible in a technologically enabled society when its citizens do not habitually think in a scientific manner. They are prey to spurious unexamined authority and buffeted by fallacious reasoning into random, often damaging decisions and outcomes.

You don't have to know everything in the science books to avoid being taken for a fool by the various interest groups that seek your approval for whatever course of action they propose or oppose. The science books are constantly being re-written, after all, as new things are found out. And it is important to note that the process of revision does not invalidate science - it is precisely the point! Scientific knowledge is provisional because science embraces human fallibility and rejects illusions of certainty.

What you do need to avoid being taken for a fool is an ability to think in the way the people who work out where the books need to be rewritten think. And that way of thinking requires no special qualification, no diploma, no years of study, no knowledge base. It can be described in one word: human.