Speaking of “elitists” and academics, today the Orange County Register - the largest SoCal newspaper that normally caters to the right-wing, went out of its way and actually published a meaningful article on AGW, specifically a detailed answer by a climate scientist to a question about AGW:

Climate question? A UCI scientist answers

Shall we look at the comments?

Long Lance says:
January 11, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Can we possibly trust anything that comes out of the mouth of an academic - whose funding relies on parroting the official line of “man is causing global warming, the dissenters are wrong, the debate is over and Algore is God”?
Radical environmentalism is the last refuge of Marxist-Leninist socialism.
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truth says:
January 11, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Modern geologists and geophysicists accept that the age of the Earth is around 4.54 billion years old
Your looking at such a small snapshot of time that it wouldn’t even be recognizable on a time line the length of a football field.
Hard to see natural earth climatic cycles when you only look at 10k years worth of data.
Global Warming is a magic act for taxation
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LA comstock says:
January 11, 2010 at 3:03 pm
How do you know what “balanced” is since the scientific data is only a small portion of the vast amount of real history? Why does the scientific community keep on trying to make CO2 a “bad” problem. It seems that you do not know or you would not take several paragraphs to explain, what may be speculation. Is this a theory or are you trying to make it a fact with statistics?
I think that this is an unproven theory, just as evolution is, and cannot be proven.
Can it be proven that the imbalance is in fact “bad”?
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[emphases added]
[and two more comments that raise questions about science, the answers of which are all over the internet and readily available]

So there you have it:
- you can’t trust academics;
- it’s just liberals wanting your money;
- and golly, if an answer actually takes a couple of paragraphs to explain a subject, well, that is just too much.

Behold, The American public, in its intellectual glory.