I think the only recourse is to define charade

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charade

The Cif article I linked has a good quote:

“As organisation grows personality may tend to disappear. It is much to control one newspaper well; it is perhaps beyond the reach of any man, or any body of men, to control half a dozen with equal success. It is possible to exaggerate the danger, for the public is not undiscerning. It recognises the authentic voices of conscience and conviction when it finds them, and it has a shrewd intuition of what to accept and what to discount.”

I think the quote from Ms. Hansen’s article that was highlighted;

“I wonder whether there weren’t better things physicists could have been doing over the last century. Just look where their work has got them. Niels Bohr, whose research led to quantum mechanics theories, went off to work on the Manhattan Project, and we all know where that got us. Thank you Oppenheimer, Bohr et al for the atom bomb.”

Is purely satirical.

I think Ms Hansen achieved her goal of getting people fired up over nothing. The charade is the assumption that the public “has a shrewd intuition of what to accept and what to discount.”

“No matter where you go, there you are.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2002/nov/29/1

Anti-science snobs will find it funny in the way people find comfort in reading a wikipedia article about something they are already know, while most lay persons will just read the article and go “huh?”

“Obama will be the first US president with a negro father, and thus the first one
with a Schwarzchild radius?”

I too, don’t think she is trying to make any deep points at all. Just humour using buzzwords taken from quantum physics. TANSTAAFLaugh.

It doesn’t appear to me that Michele Hanson chose her subject and, to my ear, she’s adopted a tone of self-deprecation towards her admitted ignorance while gently hinting that physicists might do a better job of explaining themselves. I can’t convince myself that there is any serious undertone of “sour grapes” here. I don’t think she is trying to make any deep points at all.

In the case of of QM, nobody is going to stop funding the research or stop buying the products because of foolish, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, articles. We can’t have the same level of confidence concerning the results of AGW studies, which will need a tablespoon of economical pain to implement.