The few dozen CAGW cult scientists can be seen as primaries in this thought system. Other scientists trust these cultists (they generally don't have the expertise or time to doubt such a bulwark of deception) and then build upon their work, being especially eager if they are leftists and or greenies. These scientists (from many fields, many of which have nothing to do with climate or meteorology) become the cascading secondaries; thus you get thousands of scientists supporting the claim. So if the work of the primaries is a mass of highly intellectualized and politicized quasi-science, it is easy to see how such a corruption can grow into the dominant meme and sold as consensus science. Once that lens is in place and the money spigot is turned on by governments -- with academics, businesses, and the media jumping on the bandwagon -- you have a tidal wave of hysteria: thus global warming is responsible for everything undesirable and in need of massive government control and remediation.

It is the proverbial house of cards. Expose the facade of consensus and people of integrity start to develop doubt. That's one way to begin to defeat of these deceivers. Once doubt is entertained and scientists from other fields really look at the evidence for themselves, they will more than likely become, at the very least, skeptics.

mbabbitt: I think you are exactly right. I subscribe to several journals of a scientific nature, and am disheartened to see a regular series of articles that discuss what is wrong with people that are skeptical of the climate change science. I was skeptical from the beginning because I have worked at analyzing instrumented data to try to make sense of it and I know how hard it is to figure out what is noise and what is real. They were saying that this very noisy small sample set of data showed a slope of .01 degrees per year. How could they possibly see that in the data? But I who approached it with a scientific (although perhaps mistaken) thought process am called unscientific, while the author who hasn't really seen the data and just trusts that scientists don't make silly mistakes like that is sure that he is being very scientific.

(gasp) Why who would have thunk it?

And let's not forget the role of the lap-dog media who were/are willing to believe anything that sounds like a crisis and means more government control of our lives.

Golly! What OTHER lies have we been subjected to? Surely, government health care will be better and cheaper, right? That's not going to change, is it? Billions of stimulus dollars will jump-start the economy and increase employment, won't it? We're still waiting for that, but it WILL work, right? Rising taxes will help the economy and allow better government services, right? It's always worked before, so we KNOW it will work this time, right? Better government oversight of the financial markets will prevent future disasterous market bubbles, right? (OK, enough ...)

Actually the "2,500 scientists" fraud was exposed over a dozen years ago by Fred Singer at the Science and Environmental Policy Project. He documented it in a Wall Street Journal editorial on July 25, 1997: http://www.sepp.org/key issues/glwarm/hotair.html