The breakdown of the consensus and the youtube videos would never have found fertile ground to take root in, if not for the deplorably shitty quality of science education most people get in school.
As someone who read a ton of nonfiction popular science books for fun as a teenager, and who had two graduate school level botanists as parents, I was constantly boggled from grades 7-12 by the poor quality of information being given to me by my science teachers, and by the number of flat out wrong statements I encountered in my science textbooks. The level of science coverage in the media also seemed pretty gobsmackingly awful.
In a world where issues of science are of life or death importance, the widespread degree of ignorance about science created by public education and journalism is a crime.
