Sorry, I was playing a bit of devil's advocate, or at the very least the pragmatist. This bill is terrible, I agree with you. But I think we have to be careful when we declare the scientific method as the end all be all of knowledge. I would argue that at this point climate change is NOT explainable to a layperson, or else we wouldn't be in this mess. I'm almost as afraid of people who aggressively want to sequester carbon, as those who propose we do nothing.

My point about paradigms is that science moves in demonstrable paradigms and it is very, very difficult (if not impossible) for an entrenched scientist to move beyond the paradigm in which they work.

The best guard against this is limited lifespans.

I'll also throw in there that if we had a Feynman-esque way of explaining evolution to high school students, we wouldn't be in this mess, but it turns out gene expression and the development of photo-sensitive skin is actually very difficult to comprehend completely.