All in all, it just makes me giddy to think how much more peaceful the world would be if we could just make the USSA gunverment sigh it’s last gentle breath and fade quietly into the nightmare of history.

But in a debate about the AGW hypothesis it isn’t the doubters who owe the proof, just as in a court of criminal law (as noted above) it is not the defense that owes the proof but the prosecution. And this is quite sensible: the assertion that someone has done the crime is provable if true since there is a reality corresponding to it; the assertion that someone hasn’t done the crime is not except for showing that the case in support of guilt is weak, not true beyond a reasonable doubt. (Proving negatives is only possible once the argument for the positive is in place, otherwise on is shooting in the dark!)

The biggest difference between myself and modern Progressives is that they believe we can achieve liberal ends through the use of state power. I think that is a dangerous delusion, which is inimical to the very goals that are being sought. State power does not benefit the poor and powerless over the long-term. It is always used by the rich and the powerful.

Ultimately the big problem is that there are no grants for scientists to demonstrate that carbon has little effect. There are no Institutes of Natural Climate Change, but plenty that are devoted to UnNatural Forces.

It's a monopsony, and the main point is not that the scientists are necessarily corrupted by money or status (though that appears to have happened to a few), but that there is no group or government seriously funding scientists to expose flaws.

All politicians today assume office with the claim of having jurisdiction over the lives of people who did not vote for them, of people who opposed them or did not vote at all. The question for libertarians is: how can one human being properly assume immense power over the freedom and person of unconsenting others. If rights, like freedom of speech and association, are inalienable and equal-to-all, then how can you cast a vote that transfers control over my rights to another person? Especially, how can you do this against my will and over my protest? For a libertarian, the answer is clear. You cannot transfer or nullify another person's rights by making an X on a ballot. All you can do is enable a power-seeker to assume a patina of legitimacy when he claims jurisdiction over and uses force on the unconsenting.

Ultimately, this is why the slogan “vote for change” is uninspiring. Voters don’t know if there’s going to be any change at all. And if there is going to be change, voters don’t know what sort of change it is going to be.

Perhaps David Cameron should just take a leaf from Adam Smith’s book, and promise to deliver ‘peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice’. To borrow a phrase, that would be change we can believe in.

So, isn’t the solution to America’s woes rather obvious? Abolish (don’t reform) all those socialist and interventionist programs, bring all the troops home and discharge them, and dismantle the military-industrial complex. That’s 93 percent of the budget right there. Wouldn’t that constitute a considerable savings in spending, one that would even enable Americans to abolish the federal income tax, a tax that our American ancestors lived without for more than 100 years?

Sure, liberals would go ballistic, just like conservatives would. But what better way to solve the woes of socialism and imperialism the statists have foisted on our country, along with the soaring spending, debt, taxes, and inflation, than to restore America’s heritage of economic liberty and a limited-government, constitutional republic to our land?

Consider a non-scientific parallel. If a news agency mistakenly reports that Generalissimo Fascisti Bastardo, dictator of the Latin American state of Paraquat, has been overthrown, the media will place different interpretations upon it. The Guardian will celebrate the fall of a fascist dictatorship; the Telegraph will fret that Marxists may have taken over; and the FT will express concern about the effects on the copper market. When, within hours, it emerges the report is mistaken and the dictator is still in power, all three interpretations will be proved equally wrong – because the raw data, the agency report, was an error.

Philosophy is also a discipline in which discussions are not thoroughly fraught with specialized jargon but are conducted in fairly ordinary terms. Everyone can, with a bit of effort, access these ideas, in other words, instead of submitting to the authority of experts as one would normally do in the case of most of the sciences, even when these bear directly on one’s life, such as medicine, nutrition, biology, psychology, or sociology (although in some of its special areas philosophy can get quite complex and even convoluted, just as do the sciences). Thus most who have an interest in philosophy will want to and are likely to be able to explore its topics directly or through participation in the work of contemporaries, not by reading up on the topics as dealt with in the past.

This, then, places into the hands of a certain group of people in every new generation the task of revisiting the topics of the field. These would include, as already noted, “Is there a God?” “Is there free will?” “Can we know the world?” “Is it possible to be objective?” “Are principles of conduct made up or discovered?” “What exactly is justice or equality or liberty?” And so forth and so on.

It is precisely when “facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” that we need plain old ordinary science the most. Just how high are the stakes in climate science? We do not have a scientific answer to that, we just have a bunch of fools screaming “THE SKY IS FALLING”. How urgent is action? Again, we have no scientific answer, just people screaming “WE HAVE TO ACT NOW”. Right then we need more and better science, not post normal anything.

What these figures clearly show is that people are becoming fed up of government projects that gather and centralize information and power. Indeed, the significant rise in the number of people who are concerned about the Big Brother state is striking. The current low standing of politicians and past scandals with lost data have surely gone some way to increase the public's aversion to the retention of personal information. However, somewhere along line, New Labour's erosion of our privacy has also caused people to switch from thinking 'If I have done nothing wrong than I have nothing to hide', to having real apprehension about government's plans.