Boris and your ilk (in particular William M. Connolly and pals of RealClimate):
What science is (and you would think William would know):
Notice an issue and formulate a hypothesis to explain it. Then devise an experimental means to demonstrate confidence in the likelihood of your hypothesis, preferably using mathematical logic to derive the result. Then formulate a conclusion based on the ability of your experimental results to confirm your hypothesis. Duplication by contemporaries will lead to agreement or not with your conclusion. This is not new. It was formulated in the 18th Century as the Scientific Method, and led to the Enlightenment which your lot would dearly love to reverse.
What science is not:
Notice an political issue and find a pre-existing 19th Century hypothesis to back it up. In the absence of the possibility (and inclination) to experiment; form a politically expedient conclusion and then make the conclusion fit the hypothesis by constructing elaborate computer models.
“Computer modeling has a number of attractions for academics. It does not need the resources that experimental science demands; nor does it need the long hours of careful attention required for research by measurement. In just a few hours you can create a model, just a computer program, which is so complex that no outsider can hope to unravel it. You can build in many assumptions that might well be unjustifiable under independent examination. Furthermore, the human unconscious is a mischievous influence that can produce the desired results, even for those who are not deliberately cheating. In the same few hours you can produce beautiful graphs and tables, the like of which would take months in experimental science, but which are so convincing to laymen and particularly politicians and bureaucrats.” quoted from John Brignell (I hope you don’t mind, Sir).
Also quote large amounts of data showing unprecedented recent warming from unreliable weather stations in warm urban areas and broken ones from the ex USSR. Cover up conflicting information from satellites and inconvenient El Nino events, and then form a political quango at public expense called the IPCC who relies on taxpayers money to come to a “consensus” about the above, given that all negative conclusions reduce the income of the climate hierarchy and make the latter redundant. While you’re at it discredit dissenters in true Orwellian style by ostracising, cutting off funding and using ad-hominem attacks and being the “thought police” of Wikipedia. For good measure use politically sympathetic media for “groupthink” and use editor allies of publications to “peer review” your “work”.
Then call it “science”.
