Would you buy a used automobile from these people?

In short, the e-mails do not undermine the CRU’s surface temperature record or the wider science. But that is not the point – it is the culture of climate science that has been tarnished. A picture emerges of experts who relate tribally, avoid transparency and worry too much about getting a good press. The perception is perhaps unfair, based as it is on a small, activist-minded band, but it goes back to Adam Smith’s remark about producer interests: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.”

Mr Trenberth insists the e-mail hack equated to a “swiftboating” of climate scientists, a reference to the smearing of John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He argues there is nothing wrong with scientists advocating policy: “I’m a scientist but I’m also a citizen of the world.” He is right that society wants more guidance from scientists. But what we need most is a more nuanced understanding of the risks and probabilities. That requires an intellectual elite who are climate sceptics in the true sense, rather than busily applying blue facepaint and reaching for a placard.

IMV this is happy talk that understates the problem and its consequences. It's too mild. Almost no one trusts a salesman. Advocates and activists are salesmen. They have slipped over to the dark side in pursuit of power, in the effort to be persuasive, in order to sell their positions.

They are trusted in the narrow sense that all of their actions and claims are expected to support the product on offer, but that's also a sort of distrust since contrary information is expected to be omitted or actively suppressed. The effect of the current scandals (the CRU hack isn't the only one) is that climate scientists are now considered to be unreliable as arbiters of knowledge and truth.

It was arguably naive to have ever considered them to be trustworthy. Our new views of them may be more realistic. But revealing themselves to be no better than politicians, journalists and salesmen - evangelists for some product of typically dubious worth - undermines society in potentially important ways.

For example, consider Stewart Brand's recent writings that call out environmentalists for inconsistent and inaccurate use of science, urging them to be more truly science based in their advocacy. How will that help their tarnished reputations when science itself is unreliable? It's deceits built on deceits. There's no end to the corruption and lies.

Careful thinkers have always known this and discounted both advocates and scientists, making a distinction between science and scientists in the same sense as the difference between expertise and experts. But this is now a common view contributing the the cultural nihilism discussed in recent posts here. The prospects for any sort of bold or large scale policy based on scientific claims are now seriously dimmed.

IMV this is a good thing, but it's just silly to pretend that this is not a profound change for society as a whole. It's another blow, another false idol with feet of clay has been shattered. In the past the loss of some faith - the divine right of kings, religion, etc. - gave rise to new and different faiths. Science was the beneficiary of this sort of shift. It was shelter from the storm for the apostates of earlier belief systems. Where will they shelter now?

In a odd twist it is having the opposite effect on me. When the scandal first broke I thought ho hum, nothing will come of this. It will be ignored and papered over in the blind rush to our current version of the mass psychoses that devastated the twentieth century - world war, communism, socialism etc. It was our new drunken frenzy from which we would eventually wake up with a hangover and shame. I expected climate deals to be made though they were merely Kabuki, just as I expected that the US would soon have socialized medicine though it would undermine health and well being.

Not. This is disquieting, uncomfortable. Even our monsters are now incompetent and unsteady. They break down in tears when resisted leaving us in the unaccustomed role of feeling like brutes for making them cry. There's no crying in armageddon, we complain. You lot are supposed to be reliably vile and invulnerable if not omnipotent. What a mess!

Perhaps it is as some claim: the singularity is here, it's just hard to see it from the inside. With hindsight - some decades from now - it will be apparent what happened, but it just seems like confusion during the process. Maybe seers like Kurzweil deserve closer attention.

Changes in our lives from technology are moving faster and faster. . .

Between now and 2020, the trend will continue, spreading cutting-edge technologies to every corner of the country and beginning to make innovations once consigned to the realm of science fiction real for millions of Americans. . .

By 2020 we’ll routinely have pop ups in our visual field of view that give us background about the people and places that we’re looking at.

In other words, your memory will be constantly, instantaneously aided by the information available on the Internet. The two will begin to become indistinguishable.

How about energy? That doesn’t sound like an information technology. Fossil fuels, after all, are an early first industrial revolution, 19th century technology. But we are now applying nanotechnology — the science of essentially reprogramming matter at the level of molecules to create new materials and devices—to the design of renewable energy technologies such as solar energy. As a result, the cost per watt of solar energy is coming down rapidly and the total amount of solar energy is growing exponentially. It has in fact been doubling every two years for the past 20 years and is now only eight doublings away from meeting all of the world’s energy needs.

It’s not just the gadgets we carry around and the power we use to fuel our lives that are subject to what I call “the law of accelerating returns.” Health and medicine, which used to be a hit or miss process, has now become an information technology.

We now have the software of life (our genes) and the means of upgrading that software. How long do you go without updating the software on your cell phone? Not long: it does it itself every few days or weeks. Yet we are walking around with obsolete software in our bodies that evolved thousands of years ago. Within 10 years, that will change.

Well, so, if true then the collapse of climate science and socialized medicine are no big deal. Energy will soon be clean and cheap and health care as we know it will be irrelevant. More importantly, our mental prostheses will accelerate the rate of discovery and change. Shazaam, Accelerando, try to keep up.