The charge levied against the other academics was having signed something without reviewing the source material. A few hours to see a movie isn’t exactly a high bar, and certainly isn’t equivalent to the general standard of spending 300–1000 USD to acquire a paper and the time required to test its premise and peer review it. The concern with that type of behavior is it suggests a willingness to ignore the tenants of academic and intellectual integrity in order to push something purely because it meets their confirmation bias.
It’s pretty much the same thing as anti-nuclear protesters. They’re vocal, they don’t have data, they equate power generation to weapons and the only legitimacy that can be found to justify their concerns are situations created by their attempts to use legislation to guarantee a disaster will eventually occur.
And if you don’t like that analogy:
It’s pretty much the same thing as anti-vaccination protesters. They’re vocal, they don’t have data, they equate vaccination to weapons and the only legitimacy that can be found to justify their concerns are situations created by their attempts to use legislation to guarantee a disaster will eventually occur.