Climate Change Debate 2014

Do you remember back around 2007, when the climate change furor spread fearful assurance the 'human effect' on our planet heralded certain disaster?  This scientific revelation spread like wildfire led by the Al Gore inspired Inconvenient Truth.  There were crazy stories: hotels removing Bibles from their rooms and replacing them with Al Gore's book.  Green house gases from human activity causing radical temperature change that would melt the polar ice caps and raise the ocean level by 20 feet!
Anyone daring to debunk or even challenge this spiralling challenge to civilization faced immediate and fierce public admonishment. For Gore and a legion of others a massive economic wheel began to turn. Carbon became the bad boy that built mind numbing fortunes.
Fast forward to June 2014.
Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental Economics published the latest information comparing the 'climate models' that forecast those dire predictions  to what has actually happened to global temperatures over the last 15 years. Keep in mind that the rising carbon dioxide levels actually increased some 43 percent But and its a pretty big but, during this time when temperatures were supposed to rise more rapidly there has been no change in global temperature.
This result is unavoidable 'fact' for the IPPC(intergovernmental panel on climate change).  These results at their embarrassing least have forced them to acknowledge a 'warming hiatus' since 1998.
The bigger picture is the impending possibility that their  climate models are heading for the junk pile. This is not small potatoes and requires more  explanation that gets into how these models impact economic policy. You must look elsewhere to delve into this aspect.  (I'm trying to keep this short and to the point)
The scarier scenario being played out in this is the role that science plays in our lives today.  Or, how that role has changed.  British sociologist Barry Barnes explains this about as briefly as possible.
He makes this comparison.  The old way of science was belief based on rational foundations. Now, knowledge depends on consensus and authority. "Customs and conventions are seen as the creation of human agents, actively negotiated and actively sustained under the collective control of those who initially negotiate them and subsequently sustain them. The result is to, "display scientific knowledge through and through as a social contract."
Today's social media world empowers this reality exponentially in my mind.  It is sooo hard now to know what is the truth-inconvenient or otherwise.