How to talk to progressives about climate change

I see it everyday. Conservatives, in good faith or bad, engaging a liberal or a science-minded independent on climate change. There is almost always a stain of mysterious revealed wisdom. Most do a lousy job of listening, plowing through often discredited and tedious talking points with an uncanny degree of certainty in their many errors. A surprising number fall hook, line, and sinker for every kind of nutjob conspiracy. Trying to reason with them gets you nowhere: NASA is engaged in a global scheme to deceive the world about average temperatures? For what possible purpose? Answering ‘research dollars’ belies a fundamental misunderstanding, willful or otherwise, of how science actually advances. When it comes to climate science (and a whole bunch of other stuff), science deniers and modern-day conservatives don't just have poorly developed critical thinking skills, they have non-existent ones.

But some of what they're clumsily driving at has a few elements of truth, shrouded in pejorative terms and loaded with stated or unstated accusations. If you're a conservative and you want to get that point across ...