I think it’s a relatively pure scam, equivalent to the divine right of kings c. the Middle Ages. And, if anything, the libertarians of today are worse than those of yesteryear.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19458

Andrew Weaver, IPCC Computer Modeler and Political Chameleon
By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, January 29, 2010

… among the most duplicitous and disingenuous members of the IPCC as Lead author and participant in the chapter on computer models.
Blah blah
Dr David Keith who lives in Alberta, but is a rabid devotee of the IPCC and the alarmist views on climate change. His views are easily explained. His research requires considerable.
Blah blah perverted
Blah blah blinded
Blah blah bullyboy
Blah blah, climate scientists that could only – even in the most generous of terms – be described as scandalous, and almost certainly criminal.
Blah blah blah. By Dr. Tim Ball Friday, January 29, 2010

A one way hash is a metaphor for what the author describes in only the most autistic sense, in the sense that one could say that it’s easier for one side to make up something than it is for another side to come up with a truthful rebuttal. But, other than that, I don’t see how a one-way hash explains or add insight this phenomena. Fact is, it doesn’t, it just makes it sound good, kind of like a one-way hash argument makes false statements sound good by dressing them up in technical jargon. I think one could come up with a better metaphor for what is going on here than one-way hash. Then again, maybe “one-way hash” should stick, after all, it’s a bit ironic that the metaphor that is claimed to explain it does not.

Here’s the thing.

Even a layman can see that the science for anthropogenic global warming is extremely flawed, because at a *basic* level, it doesn’t follow the scientific method. Falsifiability, control experiments, and so on are thrown out the window, just because they are “hard.” And when I say “hard,” I mean, of course, “impossible:” we cannot create an alternate Earth and see what would happen without man-made CO2 (yet), for example. But that’s no excuse. Scientists should not dismiss the flaws in their methods just because they are “hard.”

The obvious fact is — even to a layman — that AGW is simply scientists’ best guess. It’s not a fact, and the debate isn’t over.

It’s one thing to say that when a doctor tells me that I have high blood pressure, and that a certain pill will reduce my blood pressure, I should believe him: without understanding how the pill works, I understand that there’s actual science that demonstrates to a very high degree of certainty that it has this effect on blood pressure.

Unfortunately, without having a deep understanding of the actual reactions, I also understand that there’s been demonstrated no significant causative effect from man-made CO2 in the atomosphere on the temperature of the Earth. To put AGW science on the same level as other “scientific expert” claims we deal with on a daily basis is unreasonable.

It’s like DNA evidence in courts: for years it was essentially inadmissable, not because we doubted the scientists, but because we needed to really understand not the exact science, but the methods, the theories, and so on. We were not willing to just hand over such an important thing to scientists and call it a day. It was a process.

We do not need to wait for scientists to disagree on a topic (although, of course, many do disagree on this one). We can simply demand that they show us how they’ve dealt with the flaws in their methodology; how they come to the conclusion that it could not be some other unidentified phenomena instead of CO2; etc., and if they can’t, we can choose to accept it as merely their opinion, rather than as an operative fact.

Which is what it is.

The choice is not between believing AGW happens and believing it does not. We can choose the rational, third option: recognizing that we, in fact, don’t know. That the debate is not over.

(And this, of course, also leads us to the problem of Pascal’s Wager … the problem being that it’s a nonsensical form of argument, that many pro-AGW people try to use to convince us to engage in all manner of reforms “just in case” it’s true. But that’s another topic.)

The problem is, of course, when we recognize we don’t know, the zealots recognize they are less likely to get passed the policy changes they want, so they engage in the worst kind of destructive and dishonest argumentation: pretending their largely unsubstantiated opinion is fact, so they can get their way.

They are well-meaning, mostly. But they’re still wrong.