They don't need to know, but if we were talking about something less politicized by the fossil fuel industry, we'd think they were idiots for not deferring to the generally accepted science and instead saying "I don't know."

Like, say they were doing a show on the big bang. That's a pretty non-controversial thing, but we obviously don't know what happened back then. Still, we sure don't see a whole lot of big bang skeptics around (and probably a lot of us here would think they were being willfully ignorant or coy to say "well, I don't know, I wasn't there"). Big bang skepticism isn't an unofficial part of a major political party, either. What's the difference here, I wonder.