A prominent neurologist, Steven Novella, seems to think so:
To Novella’s chagrin, the rubes don’t fall in line with science experts nearly as often as scientific experts think they ought to. Why so?
Consider Joe Blow. Joe has no scientific education. He’s a truck driver. He works a couple of jobs to support his family, he pays his taxes, coaches his son’s little league team, and goes to church on Sundays. He is anything but a scientific expert, but he does know a few things.
Joe has been told since the 1980s that the world is going to end due to global warming. It sounds like those crazy guys with the placards who say the world is gonna end tomorrow. The earth’s sell-by-date keeps getting pushed forward — polar ice caps were supposed to melt, but didn’t, polar bears were supposed to go extinct, but didn’t, sea levels were supposed to inundate coastal cities, but didn’t, and tens of millions of climate refugees were supposed to perish fleeing the catastrophic heat. Joe’s still waiting. He is also still waiting for the apocalyptic global cooling he was told about in the 1970s (Joe ain’t no scientist, but he has a good memory). He remembers watching Paul Ehrlich on TV in the late 1960s warning that overpopulation was going to cause billions of people to die of starvation and cause nations to disintegrate over the next couple of decades. Joe wonders how a scientist could be so wrong and still keep his job and even get elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Joe knows that if he screwed up his own job like that, he’d be fired before the day was out. But those rules don’t apply to scientists.
Michael Egnor, “Is Joe Blow “Anti-Intellectual”?” at Evolution News and Science Today
One reason for many recent political upheavals in a variety of jurisdictions is that Joe has begun to wonder if he’s really the one with the problem.