On Feb. 15, conservative Washington Post columnist and frequent baseball commentator George Will ignited a firestorm after accusing climate scientists of speciously drumming up concern over global warming.

Will’s hypothesis — and here I use the word loosely — is that current climate predictions are incorrect and that humans have not affected climate and sea levels to a worrying degree by injecting greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Others, more forcefully and accurately than I ever could, have torn apart and given context to the few facts that Will chose to cite. Chief among these have been Will’s spurious assertions that sea ice levels today are the same as in 1979 and that, “according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade.” I urge you to check (and, in the process, receive a primer on climate science) any of the recently published rebuttals and blog posts that refute his claims.

My grouse isn’t over Will’s misrepresentation or cherry-picking of the facts, shameful as they may be, and especially for someone who fancies himself a sober-minded public intellectual. In fact, op-ed pages are just the place for Will’s propaganda. I’m concerned about those people — 44 percent of American voters, according to a recent poll released by Rasmussen — who agree and believe humans have had no role at all in global warming trends. It is precisely these individuals who, unlucky enough to stumble across Will’s column, lack the scientific knowledge to recognize him as a fraudster and take his words to heart.

As long as there is a public willing to consume ill-reasoned and ideological attacks on scientific theories, there should exist a soapbox for people willing to air those views. As Rosa Luxembourg, philosopher and revolutionary in pre-war Germany, remarked, “Freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.” And even, in cases such as this, to be wrong. The responsibility to logically filter and take in these views lies with the consumer. The goal shouldn’t be to rob the pundit of his soapbox, but to convince the audience that he isn’t worth the time.

By airing his opinion, Will not only has opened himself and fellow climate change-deniers to attack from those with far greater knowledge on the issue, he has exposed himself as a reactionary ideologue, not a “conservative intellectual,” as he is so often labeled.

In fact, one might start to think “conservative intellectual” a contradiction in terms. With all due respect to the Heritage Foundation, when conservative principles have to be filtered through a group of presidential candidates willing to publicly acknowledge a disbelief in evolution, one starts to get worried. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who made his comically disastrous national debut following President Obama’s address to Congress last week, is one of those who claims that “intelligent design” should be taught alongside the theory of evolution, so that students can “make decisions for themselves.”

I must note, however, that although creationists and climate change-deniers share much in common — including a political party — the questions of teaching evolution in a science class and climate change-denialism on newspaper opinion pages are fundamentally different. The difference is that one prepares you for the other; science education in public schools prepares the voting population for the basic kinds of scientific judgments they need to make.

Indeed, it is here where I respectfully disagree with my fellow liberal-leaning commentators who would lump all “bad science” together, and argue for boycotts and letter campaigns against Will’s publisher, the Washington Post.

There are two approaches to the admittedly worrying increase of “bad science” in the public sphere, particularly when so many of our political decisions rely on scientific theories. It seems simple: we can either decrease the bad stuff or increase the good stuff.

But here’s a third possibility: Let’s give more grist for the mill and actually increase the bad stuff. Let’s have HIV/AIDS deniers, creationists, climate change deniers, religious fundamentalists, Scientologists, racial determinists and all other kooks air their views in open forums, and see who comes out the winner. Because we won’t have a truly educated population until views like Will’s are thoroughly and publicly discredited.

So write away, George Will, and invite your friends. It’s up to those who have the facts on their side to offer the counter-argument, and to offer it publicly and repeatedly.

Ryan Seals is a second-year student at the Rollins School of Public Health from Farmington Hills, Mich.