Here is a summary of movie reviews of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed".

Read through the comments... for as long as you can stomach them...

I'm a scientist. I've got a diploma in physics (roughly the equivalent of a MSc), and I'm currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computational Materials Science. While the number of scientific publications with my name on it is still fairly small, it is steadily growing. So I know the fundamentals of how the scientific method works in both theory and practice.

And whenever I see some sort of post in an online forum I frequent that makes claims which I am fairly certain is inaccurate, I try to argue with those claims. However, I have found that this can get quickly out of hand when the subject matter is highly controversial, such as global warming or evolution. Not controversial in scientific terms, mind you, but in the field of public opinion, for in these fields the knowledge of the general public tends to strongly lag behind established scientific knowledge (actually, that's true of other fields as well - but in these other fields it is uncommon for a large segment of the public to take offense at the scientific consensus. For instance, few people know how dendrites in minerals form, but they won't automatically be hostile to an explanation of how it works).

And I find myself somewhat at a disadvantage in such debates. You see, when I make any claims contradicting the claims of the first poster, I don't just want to say: "No, you are wrong!". Instead, I want to support my claims with evidence. Not on the level that would be required for peer-reviewed papers, but still in a way that there are no apparent major holes in my arguments. So when someone posts a link to a page that says something on the lines of "100 Scientists Sign Petition That Claims IPCC Reports Are Exaggerated", then I dig and dig to discover how many of these scientists actually have any expertise in climatology or related fields (not many) or how many of those have actually published something in this field in the last five years to show that they are still involved in the latest research (even less). Researching all this can take an hour or more (and that doesn't even count the time spent looking for connections of these people to Exxon, which are rather frequent in such cases), but when I'm finished, I can at least be reasonable confident in my statements.

But then my "opposite number" in such a discussion, who frequently didn't have any advanced scientific training and usually doesn't feel bound to do the same amount of research, just types "Global Warming Hoax" into Google and posts a link to the next result that comes up. And propaganda sites which make wild claims are a dime a dozen - not surprisingly, since they don't have to back up their claims with scientific evidence and still are able to convince a lot of people without scientific training of the truth of their claims.

So to counter the arguments on that site, I have to do research all over again, which again can take me hours - while posting links to propaganda sites only takes a minute or two. So I'm all to often loosing such debates - not because my arguments are lacking, but because I simply don't have the time to post everything that needs to be said to counter such claims. So sooner or later I have to stop posting to such discussions, and any observer is left with the impression: "That guy had the last word, so he's probably had the better arguments." After all, how can they tell apart without learning how scientific research works?

This is, needless to say, fairly frustrating. Can anyone here give me any advice on how to handle such situations?