Logical Connections

One of the things that seems absolutely rampant in the world today is a rather poor grasp of logic and rhetoric.  These are things that used to be an integral part of what was termed a liberal education.  It's rather ironic that, in an age where we are rapidly advancing our technical ability, we are losing the very skills that we need to remain in control of that technology.  We have this illusion of science as an exercise in numbers, data, experiments and analysis.  But one thing I learned rather clearly in my college physics class: writing up the lab report well is actually just as important, grade-wise, as coming to the "correct" conclusion.
But we tend to jump to conclusions.  We rather assume that conclusions are, well, conclusive, and often they are not at all.  Science needs to make headlines just like everything else these days, and headlines don't like things like standard deviations and margins of error.  They like even less going back and examining the premises on which a researcher establishes a chain of causation, and so, pretty much on a daily basis, you have some mind-blowing conclusion that is actually debunked by good old rhetorical analysis, not even further research, just a re-examination and re-framing of the data already collected.
The problem is that the general public doesn't always have the skill to conduct this debunking, because things are so technical.  I can tell you about all the data that 99 percent of climate scientists tell us points to a man-made climate change, but I don't actually sit around looking at that data myself (I'm terrible at statistics for one thing), but I can look at the statements and the summaries made by those scientists and put that together with the sort of conceptual scientific understanding that I do have, i.e. atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased over the period of time we have been paying attention to such things, average global temperature has also been increasing during the same time, there is a possible causal link between the two phenomenon.  Depending on whether I believe this is going to have catastrophic environmental consequences is a more complicated discussion, but the link is increasingly strong, and the consensus of the scientific community supports that.  Ten to fifteen years ago, there was less certainty, and it took time for more research to be done and more certainty to build, but there are still people who heard alternate explanations a decade ago holding on to those outdated ideas, and this insistent and deliberate ignorance becomes increasingly insane.
Speaking of insanity, the opposite of this phenomenon is found in the anti-vaccine movement.  Someone noticed that, all of the sudden, there were larger and larger numbers of children being diagnosed with autism.  This seemed to roughly coincide with an era where children were being vaccinated as infants against a variety of illnesses.  Someone came up with the idea that there was a causal link between autism and being vaccinated.  Since autism is a pretty unfortunate thing to have happen to a kid, a bunch of parents decided not to get their kids vaccinated.  Viola, welcome back measles.  As it turns out there was absolutely no evidence of the causal connection between vaccines and autism, but again people like to hold on to stuff they believed a while back.  As it turns out, a more likely scenario is that cases of autism have been fairly common in the human population going back a ways, but people with milder expressions of autism were just seen as shy, or anti-social, or just a little off, while people with more severe expressions were often institutionalized and the disorder was called something else.
We buy or don't buy these explanations largely based on our worldview (i.e. is it well accepted by people I agree with or not), for instance anti-vaxxers tend to be soccer mom types in affluent suburban type places, climate change deniers tend to be people invested in the oil industry and their Fox news mouthpieces, and Donald Trump (I make it a personal moral priority to disagree with anything Donald Trump says).  Those are stereotypes, yes, but they illustrate that, in many instances, acceptance or non-acceptance of scientific data is a largely social decision.
If your social circle is into large, off-road pickup trucks that get about 12 MPG, you're going to be a little less receptive to someone who tells you to get a Prius to save the polar bears (even if you think polar bears are way cool).  You're just not going to accept the rather complicated relationships between more C02 in the atmosphere, caused by your gas guzzler and the melting of the polar ice caps.
Likewise, if you're one of those parents who only feeds your kids organic yogurt and bean sprouts, you might be pre-disposed to be a little suspicious of a doctor shooting all sorts of vaccines into your little pink baby, you might take more convincing.  But the flaw is not in the data, the flaw is in the way it's presented.  The reality of the world we live in is that everything needs a good PR campaign.  It's not good enough just to do the science, you have to be able to sell the results.