interesting the reference to the 'Malleus Maleficarum' (the witches hammer)

Another word that comes to mind is 'Sophistry'.

Emotive arguements that hook the emotions over ride the more logical and critical thinking part of the human brain. Usually the first emotive reaction later proves to have been incorrect.

Film and documentary makers can do this with skill. These films can be portrayed as being unbiased, when they are heavily biased.

Another reference is too what is known as 'Successful Sociopathy'.
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/dissent/documents/health/sociopathy.html

oh dear Mal such a bad article. You promised so much and delivered nothing other than yet another plea from the right that it's okay to be sceptical of science if it doesn't agree with your world view. what was the point of this article? you can read a thousand others written by a thousand pundits on blogs across the political spectrum. Why not layout a path forward for your fellow right wingers to get to the land of reality. All you done is say their people on the left that have got the science wrong so it's okay for us to do it to. Just like the "debates" about evilution, gem theory and the flat earth the politics needs to be taken out of it, your article has retarded progress towards this goal not advanced it.
For those of you watching form home the phrase “Yet unfortunately rather than going where the evidence leads, ideology wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea.” Is a dead giveaway . It’s a rather famous (infamous) ploy of anti-science writers to lead into a misdirection, accuse for opposition of the very thing you are doing

It would be interesting to see how many of the people who wanted to claim 'Weather is not climate' when things were cool are now eagerly pointing out high temperatures as proof of AGW. Of course, South America is currently freezing, Antarctic ice coverage is at a record high, and the satellite temperature record is heading down -- probably needs a good solid 'homogenizing'.

But it's all in a good cause, so AGW enthusiasts can lie and cheat and close their eyes to the facts. God says so. Sorry, did I say God? I meant the IPCC.

Oh dear, Kenny is not having a bar of this "skeptical is acceptable" business. I don't think he got your point at all and the moment it seemed you were not flaying skeptics, you're obviously wrong, paid by "dark interests" and right wing think tanks and all manner of the usual paranoia of the true religious fanatic.

No, if you don't believe, as clearly Kenny does, then there is no room for you, no tolerance at all, mind you I'm sure Kenny expects tolerance of his rather intolerant views.

Good article, asking for a reasonable debate, asking for reason at all is good.

I see though that many on the AGW side are just like Kenny and have completely suspended all reason and are now completely medieval religious thinkers, if you can call it thinking, and not just blind faith.

I'm not so sure about your comments Kenny. He is having a double-go at the media and how the climate argument has been framed. It seems more a call for clarity and a study of how we know what we know. I'm going with rpg here. I think 'sceptical is acceptable' is OK - or not, depending on which side of the fence one sits.

Magical thinking - that's when you think your weekly wage will be enough to save for a house deposit.

The least of the warmists' irrationality is in the positive science.

The far greater irrationality is in thinking that
a) positive science supplies the value judgments by which policy can decide whether people should live or die, and
b) government is capable of solving the problem by substituting for individual freedom, whole empires of centralized command-and-control bureaucracies, guided by reams of rules and regulations, and backed up by police, magistrates and prisons.

Underlying this belief system of the warmists, is the more general reverencing of the state. Like other irrational belief systems, this is also neither verifiable nor falsifiable. How do we know that government policies, interventions, taxes and subsidies are good for the environment? Why, because the government pays people who decide that they are of course – why else would they be doing them? And if they don’t work, what is the solution? More interventions of course!

The underlying irrational assumption is “Because problem, solution = government”. But no-one ever explains *how* the central planning authorities are going to displace existing production processes and (a) continue to feed the world’s population while (b) making a more sustainable and fairer use of resources: - apart from by simply assuming the intrinsic infallibility, perfection and goodness of the state.

The totalitarianism of the warmist movement is just another symptom of the underlying totalitarianism of the national socialism funding the science. Governments having paid tens of billions of dollars to tens of thousands of employees to find, from an astronomically complex data set, that the globe is warming, these government employees have dutifully gone out, and funded their mortgages and cappuccinos by finding, surprise surprise, that the globe is warming, even though 90 percent of the weather stations don't even comply with their own minimum accuracy standards!

Merely abolishing the government funding of warmist policies will not strike to the root. Government funding of science is inherently corrupting, and should be abolished.