It is disgraceful that an entire industry of professional intellectuals should have so fundamentally failed to perform, so woefully failed to see the yawning abyss of ignorance they were blithely skating over, and the gross errors of their assumptions in favour of government, which put simply, have no basis in reason or evidence, and therefore are not and cannot be "science".

And it all JUST HAPPENED to suit their own interests, and the aggrandisement of government power, didn't it?

The governmental funding of intellectuals is intrinsically corrupt, no different in essence to the mediaeval state's links with the mediaeval church, and should be abolished.

And yet somehow I think science will survive.

Ah yes Bugsy. Science shall indeed survive. Despite the misuse of it by people such as...

No, I won't write that.

It's always disturbing to read denialists, who habitually publish sneaky half-truths and lies and (some) even take money from big oil and king coal, cry their hearts out for their persecution at the hands of those mean peer-reviewed guys! In the meantime big oil and king coal continue to spend hundreds of millions lobbying for their (destructive) products, funding lying 'institutes' like Heartland, and confusing the public. Yeah, denialists are victims, one and all. I'm crying into my beer thinking of you!

On the other hand the physics of CO2 were discovered nearly 200 years ago by Fourier, and many others since then have verified the radiative forcing.

"By the early 1960’s much had changed. Many scientists had become seriously concerned that warming might be no mere phase of a modest natural cycle but the onset of an accelerating climb, unprecedented and foreboding."
Spencer Weart
Physics Today 1997
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/ClimateChangeWhiteboard/Resources/Uncertainty/climatech/weart97PR.pdf

Catastrophic climate change was becoming mainstream science, as this Bell Telephone company Science Hour show from 1958 demonstrates.
It's only a few minutes long: watch it and enjoy the retro animation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-AXBbuDxRY

So whatever 'global conspiracy' you're trying to believe in, now you've got to make it stretch back nearly 200 years! How good is your collective denialist imagination to come up with a conspiracy that can survive industrialisation, WW1, WW2, the 1960's and the Cold War? Good luck with that!

It is very interesting that deniers make a huge fuss about climate change; yet, their opposition only has a few decades history, while as you say Max, the history of climate change science goes back nearly 200 years.

What we get from deniers is regurgitation of the same old arguments over and over. It has been possible to show through simple experimentation in a High School lab that CO2 and light interact; much more sophisticated experiments in the environment have also proved the point.
Where is the experimentation deniers can refer too?
The fundamental premise of climate change has not been touched.

Something fascinating to watch is how deniers decry the IPCC as some kind of plot created by the United Nations; though, happily quote the IPCC when it suits them.
The other interesting aspect is that deniers such as Watts and Moncton have been shown to be wrong on several occasions by analysing their comments against science or what is happening in the environment. An example, Moncton suggested there has been no warming in the marine environment when defending a paper he had written with Willie Soon; a quote suggests otherwise:
"Sea surface temperatures were as high as 15.8°C or 60.4°F near Svalbard on November 7, 2015, a 13.7°C or 24.7°F anomaly. Let this sink in for a moment. The water used to be close to freezing point near Svalbard around this time of year, and the water now is warmer by as much as 13.7°C or 24.7°F."

From:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com.au

Climate scientists have informed us that a warmer atmosphere carries much more water vapour; meaning that precipitation events potentially can be more severe. It is now common to see news clips of cars and even houses being swept away by floods. There have always been floods, but the number and severity of floods have increased.

Yes Ant,
the same tired old arguments and then selective quoting of the IPCC while accusing it of all being a conspiracy: so tiresome!

Can't these people realise coal kills 3 million people, poisons our populations and costs us DOUBLE the retail price by the externalised health costs inflicted on the population? That coal dumps ash 100 times more radioactive than any nuclear plant just in the local environment somewhere? (If only that were the only concern, because even that radiation is not really that bad). That it dumps heavy metals into the environment, and will one day peak and become far more expensive? That it will run out?