As a great rule of thumb, I have found out that pseudo-science, that is, using “science” to bring about social change that you cannot get otherwise, is very reliant on several devious tricks.
The first of these is “raising public awareness”, as a goal.
I had my first real experience with this scam before large capacity toilets were banned by the federal government.
Being from a desert state, the assumption was that saving water is important. A reasonable assumption. But all the emphasis was put on residential water conservation. Again, on the surface it sounds reasonable.
Until you look at water use in the state. Some 98% of the fresh water was used for #1 agriculture, #2 mining, and #3 business. The bulk of the rest was used for recreational water, things like golf courses that consume large amounts. And only a little more than 1% was for residential use.
This was puzzling. Why put all the conservation effort on to the smallest user of water? Even if it was wildly successful, it would achieve nothing.
“It’s important to raise public awareness!”, was the response. Nonsense. But then it got much, much worse.
The state mining industry, for purely financial reasons, decided to not buy all that fresh water, to instead recycle the huge amount of water it used. Nobody had asked them to do that, they just did it on their own to save money.
But this meant that overnight, the state had 1/3rd more fresh water. Wee! Victory, right?
Nothing changed. Still the now obviously “water conservation” propaganda, still directed at residential users only, continued. Huh?
Because, as one of its advocates succinctly put it, “raising public awareness is the real goal!”
That is, that this was never about water, or the lack thereof, or even solution to real shortage. It was about convincing the public that water was in shortage, so its supply had to be carefully managed and rationed *by the government*.
This jaundiced my eye at an early age, so I started paying attention to what such scoundrels were doing, no longer looking with the positive image of “starry eyed idealists”, but as people with a far more cynical and insidious agenda in mind.
The next big leap in understanding happened with a real environmental issue, one that was again touted as being an important reason to have government control and rationing over “shortage”.
Some bright, creative individuals came up with a simple, inexpensive solution to the problem, and were shouted down, because the only *permitted* solution was through government control and rationing. And the truth dawned that actually *solving* the problem had nothing to do with it. That those backing this agenda were utterly indifferent to the problem itself, and truly did not care whether it was solved or not, as long as they got what they wanted.
The final leg to this came with the MMGW problem. Because no matter the specifics of the problem, or even if it *was* a problem, did not matter to those advocating the theory.
James Hansen, for example, had in his early career proposed and supported Man Made Global Cooling. And yet, his *solutions* to MMGC were *exactly* the same as they have been for MMGW! That is, more government control and rationing. Since shortage obviously does not exist, it must be created, by *stopping* the production of energy.
Something that Obama and the Democrats are trying very hard to achieve.
But it goes beyond that. In the 1970s, there was the science fraud, butterfly expert, Paul R. Ehrlich, even whose name irritates me, because he was named after the great scientist Dr. Paul Ehrlich, one of the best scientists who ever lived.
In any even P.R. Ehrlich’s fake crisis, The Population Bomb, which was an utter failure, still proposed *exactly* the same draconian solutions that Hansen proposes.
That is, much more powerful government and rationing of everything.
The old East Germany was the end result of what such people crave. It was noted that even color and music were rationed, solely for use to promote the state. The only paint people could buy was white, gray and black.
Because they were utterly incompetent at handling the big issues of their nation, East Germany was a showpiece of decay, despair, environmental degradation, horrific pollution, dehumanization, nanny government of every aspect of the lives of its people, perpetual shortage of everything, etc.
In other words, it was paradise, as far as Obama and company, the MMGW crowd, and such scoundrels are concerned.
This being said, the issue of the real science, by real scientists, about global warming and whether it is man made, becomes almost incidental to stopping these people. For them, science is just a tool to be corrupted for their schemes, nothing more.
In the final analysis, even if the Earth substantially warmed, any harm it might cause is much, much less than what would be causes if such people ever again attain their goals.
It is not very productive to stop them by appealing to irrelevancies. For example discussing alternative theories of warming that conclude that a N2/O2 atmosphere (no CO2) would result in evaporation and essentially the same global warmth as we have with CO2. Those make me cringe, but I always read them to make sure I haven't missed something. Inevitably the people proposing the theory have missed a lot of physics (e.g. absorption of radiation). People can discuss these alternatives in a scientific forum, but disseminating them to the lay public as fact or representing it as mainstream controversy is a grave disservice to the public.
It is more productive to stop the takeover by demonstrating that after enormous expense the production of alt energy is trivial (not counting good old fashioned dams and biomass - results from a strong economy that uses a lot of wood). One can also point out that the models that predict catastrophe (which are not believable) also predict that doing anything short of destroying the economy will not change the temperature outcome. Or one can point out that Europe's moving their manufacturing to China to satisfy Kyoto accomplished nothing.
My preference is a more complex argument that the "high sensitivity" science is not well founded. Often it uses paleo data to prove some number which can't be quantified without a model which is in fact the same model used to make catastrophic predictions from today. Early versions of that model (e.g. Hansen 1981) predict temperatures too high which basically shows that there is no great amount of positive feedback (sensitivity of about 1.5C).
It's a complex argument that loses a lot of people so I'm not satisfied with that approach.