…but that usually doesn’t end well. Scott Huler at Plugged In reports on the futile attempts of North Carolina legislators and members of a developer’s lobbying group to legislate away a possibly catastrophic sea level rise by making non-linear scientific models illegal:
That is, the meter or so of sea level rise predicted for the NC Coastal Resources Commission by a state-appointed board of scientists is extremely inconvenient for counties along the coast. So the NC-20 types have decided that we can escape sea level rise – in North Carolina, anyhow – by making it against the law. Or making MEASURING it against the law, anyhow.
The key language is in section 2, paragraph e, talking about rates of sea level rise: “These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly. …” It goes on, but there’s the core: North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises.
This is the product of people who have been fooled by their own lies. It reminds me of the classic Feynman quote, written into his appendix to the Space Shuttle Challenger report:
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
On the other hand, if this does become law (unlikely), there are all sorts of ways to transform your data so that you can make accurate linear extrapolations.
The Finch and Pea 
Read the comments to the original SciAm article, and you’ll see first-hand the shockingly poor public understanding of what ‘model’ means in science:
” Extrapolation is not fact. It is estimate. And the accuracy is in the eye of the beholder. So if they want to legislate HOW to estimate, it is far less controversial than you make it sound. You base estimates on past experience, not models, which is what climate change is really based on, not fact.”
Newsflash: y = mx + b applied to data to make future predictions is in fact a model.