Brenden O’Neill reviews a climate change exhibit at the Science Museum of London:

…That we are expected to sit and stare at this “Sun,” to be passive recipients of some higher wisdom from a disc hovering above our heads, speaks volumes about how environmentalists view both “science” and ordinary people’s intellectual capabilities. For them, scientific fact is a kind of divine revelation, an unquestionable truth, which must be delivered from on high to us little people in order to wake us from our consumerist-induced stupor and make us rethink our destructive habits. In treating science as both Gospel and political weapon, the green-leaning organizers of this exhibition have committed an act of double violence against scientific truth and integrity.

Indeed, the “Prove It!” exhibition unwittingly, yet brilliantly, illustrates why climate-change alarmism has no place in the world of real science, an arena that ought to be marked by open-mindedness, truth-seeking, and intellectual seriousness. Where most of the Science Museum engages visitors through intelligent exhibitions, explaining in measured terms how things were discovered or how breakthroughs were made, the “Prove It!” exhibition screams slogans in our faces from an overhead projector. Where many of the rooms in the Science Museum take us through the various leaps forward that led to modern technology and medicine, the “Prove It!” exhibition contains no climate science at all (presumably it’s too complicated for us idiots), only ready-made, life-altering slogans.

When science is treated as given, unquestionable, and supremely authoritative, Sun-like in its obviousness, then it ceases to be science at all and becomes something closer to religious decree. The motto of the U.K. Royal Society, which helped to found the Science Museum 100 years ago, was “On the word of no one,” capturing science’s rejection of traditional forms of wisdom and authority and its embrace of experimentation, exploration, and the authority of the truth alone. Yet today, we are expected to uncritically accept the word of the Science Museum, and to vote in favor of using so-called scientific fact to drive an explicitly political agenda at Copenhagen in December.

We’re not as stupid as they want us to be.