Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2010

Not only is the science not “settled”, we still need to learn far more

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

Counter-intuitively, although the sun has been going through a period of decreased activity over the last few years, a new study in Nature claims that there’s been an increase in the amount of visible light and near-infrared energy:

New data indicates that changes in the Sun’s output of energy were a major factor in the global temperature increases seen in recent years. The research will be unwelcome among hardcore green activists, as it downplays the influence of human-driven carbon emissions.

As the Sun has shown decreased levels of activity during the past decade, it had been generally thought that it was warming the Earth less, not more. Thus, scientists considered that temperature rises seen in global databases must mean that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions — in particular of CO2 — must be exerting a powerful warming effect.

Now, however, boffins working at Imperial College in London (and one in Colorado) have analysed detailed sunlight readings taken from 2004 to 2007 by NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. They found that although the Sun was putting out less energy overall than usual, in line with observations showing decreased sunspot activity, it actually emitted more in the key visible-light and near-infrared wavelengths.

These shorter wavelength forms of radiated heat penetrate the atmosphere particularly well to heat up the Earth’s surface — just as the same frequencies get in through car windows to heat up its interior. The hot seats and dashboard — in this case the seas, landmasses etc — then radiate their own increased warmth via conduction, convection and longer-wave infrared, which can’t escape the way the shortwave energy came in. This is why the car, and the planet, become so hot.

Thus the Sun, though it was unusually calm in the back half of the last decade, was actually warming the planet much more strongly than before.

If this research is confirmed, it certainly provides a lot of ammunition to the folks who don’t want to spend huge sums to try to cut down carbon emissions.

October 4, 2010

The moral blindness of the 10:10 campaign

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:20

Eric S. Raymond watched the eye-opening propaganda piece from the 10:10 campaign:

I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.

[. . .]

The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large. Thoughtcrime brings death! Conform! Obey! Or die . . . and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning. I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word. They thought they were being funny.

[. . .]

There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.

[. . .]

To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny — because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.

As many have commented, how could this video possibly have been professionally written, directed, acted, filmed, and edited with nobody actually noticing how awful it was? Were they all so morally sure of the righteousness of their cause that the didn’t recognize (or care) how most people would react to their casual — even cheerful — butchery?

October 1, 2010

“No pressure” . . . BOOM!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

I have to imagine that this little propaganda number was put together by the anti side rather than the pro side:

You don’t agree with this program? No pressure . . . we’ll blow up your kids. James Delingpole thinks it’s great (but not for the cause it supposedly represents):

But with this new monstrosity, truly the great Richard Curtis has excelled himself. It’s so bad, it makes his previous shimmering masterpieces of emetica – Love Actually, The Girl In The Cafe, The Boat That Rocked – look like Battleship Potemkin. It makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. It’s so deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful it makes you wish that the man could be given a ticker tape parade in every major capital city, in gratitude for the devastating damage he has (unwittingly) wrought on the eco-fascist cause.

Update: Apparently, James isn’t the only one who thinks this is sending exactly the wrong message — the campaign is trying to recall the clip:

That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do — cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.

Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

I don’t think any of us will ever be able to look at another Richard Curtis movie in quite the same way ever again. It may even be that we will now never, ever be able to enjoy another episode of the Vicar of Dibley, because all we’ll be able to think about is Dawn French with a Panzerfaust beneath her cassock ready to blast off the heads of any members of her congregation who don’t believe in Man Made Global Warming. What a sad day this is for us all.

Update, the second: Iowahawk thinks this may well be a great subject for a Harvard Business School case study. Using the principles of “new journalism”, he carefully recreates the situation, constructing dialogue to fit the theme:

London, sometime earlier this year: The 10:10 Project, a nonprofit NGO focused on reducing carbon, convenes a high level meeting in their posh modern conference room. After reviewing PowerPoint on the results of their latest government grant proposals and white-liberal-guilt fund raising campaigns, the 10:10 marketing team reports that previous communication efforts have not been proceeding as expected.

“Perhaps what we need is a fresh new campaign,” offers one of the conferees. “Something different, provocative… something edgy. Something that will really get our message across.” This is greeted with great excitement. The finance director pours through spreadsheets and identifies a budget source. An executive screening committee is appointed who develop timelines and begin scheduling meetings with London’s top agencies and independent film production firms.

Several weeks later, after sitting through a half dozen agency presentations that have yet to meet their standards, 10:10’s highly paid executive brain trust arrives at a meeting at the sleek offices of London’s hottest agency Splodey, Youngblood, Gutz & Bones. After introductions, small talk, and pastries, SYG&B’s creative director — winner of 5 British Clio awards — strolls confidently to the television monitor at the front of the room and walks the 10:10 clients through a scene-by-scene video storyboard pitching a new promotional mini-movie that will solve their communication dilemma. The smoothness of the presentation masks the hundreds of late night man-hours and debating the SYG&B creative department spent in crafting it — but it was worth it.

“Brilliant!” exclaims the 10:10 executive committee chair, to the enthusiastic nods of his colleagues. “Add one more exploding child, and I think we have a winner.”

Read the whole thing, as they say.

September 17, 2010

QotD: Goodbye “climate change”, hello “global climate disruption”

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”

And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).

Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. So too is Dave “Grocer” Cameron’s excuse for a government. Its solution? Work out ways of brainwashing the populace with state-funded propaganda.

James Delingpole, “Global warming is dead. Long live, er, ‘Global climate disruption’!”, Telegraph.co.uk, 2010-09-17

June 17, 2010

Get in on Cap & Trade now!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

If you were hesitating about whether to get involved in Cap and Trade, hesitate no longer:

I have become a convert on the Cap And Trade thing. I am all in; pedal to the metal; go for broke; shoot the moon; a true fracking believer now.

This C&T shit has more revenue generating potential than prohibition ever did. You’ll generally be dealing with a better class of people who aren’t as inclined to settle their differences with machine guns, which is a big plus. Another big advantage over bootlegging is there’s no actual product involved, so all the usual logistics and end point sales issues involved with smuggling vanish.

It is truly a beautiful beautiful thing; even better than selling lots on the moon or mars, because the government doesn’t force people to buy real estate on the moon and mars.

If Al Capone were alive today, he’d be a carbon trader.

April 14, 2010

QotD: The environmental conspiracy theorists

Filed under: Environment, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

In the conventional wisdom, conspiracy theorists are stubble-faced old coots missing every third tooth, who live in backwoods shacks and claim the Pope (who is really Hitler’s love child) is in league with the Freemasons and the World Economic Forum to enslave us all through the cashless society.

Environmentalists, on the other hand, live in low-energy townhouses in upscale neighbourhoods, drink fair-trade coffee from 100% post-consumer recyclable cups, drive hybrid cars and eat only organic food grown within 100 kilometres of their homes. They are trendy, tony, highly educated and socially conscious with small carbon footprints. So, surely, they can’t be conspiracy theorists.

But they are.

In his new book, for instance, Mr. McKibben spins a tale about a vast web of shadowy payoffs to for-hire scientists, and intense pressure placed on politicians and editors by powerful lobbyists. He, like many environmentalists, sees himself and his colleagues as the little guys battling an enormous, unseen disinformation machine funded by Big Oil and Big Coal that is keeping the people from hearing the truth about the coming climate catastrophe.

They fancy themselves the underdogs when in fact they are the overdogs.

Lorne Gunter, “Green paranoia on parade”, National Post, 2010-04-14

April 12, 2010

New “green” jobs to pay over $300K

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:49

Oh, wait. Sorry, that should be will cost over $300K:

The Government of Ontario recently signed a $7 billion no-bid contract with two Korean companies to supply wind and solar power to the province. Officials claim the backroom deal will boost “green” industry and job creation. But it’s hard to fathom how the additional employment can possibly be beneficial when each new manufacturing job will cost taxpayers a whopping $303,472. Nor do dramatic increases in electricity rates constitute much of a bargain.

Having failed on his pledge to shutter all coal-fired plants in the province by 2007, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty evidently has sought a grand green gesture that would appease the global warming alarmists. Executives of Samsung C&T Corp., in concert with the Korean Electric Power Corporation, were understandably eager to cooperate.

The agreement commits the province to buy wind and solar energy from the two companies at artificially high rates. It also extends to Samsung and Korean Power preferential access to the transmission network at the expense of independent wind power producers. As if either provision won’t adequately punish Ontarians, McGuinty also has pledged to override local zoning laws in locating new wind farms and transmission corridors.

Update, 12 February 2011: Even Premier McGuinty can only deny financial reality for so long:

Times of international turmoil are great moments for domestic governments to make important announcements they don’t want to be noticed. Especially if the announcement involves a sudden reversal in policy that could seriously embarrass the government.

So Friday afternoon was an ideal time for Ontario’s Liberal government to take a big chunk of its alternative energy program and chuck it overboard. Attention was riveted on Egypt, where spectacular events were unfolding. The perfect opportunity for Premier Dalton McGuinty to engineer yet another major reversal, while paying a minimal price among voters.

After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan. Turns out there just isn’t enough scientific evidence that offshore wind projects do a lick of good, said Brad Duguid, the energy minister.

March 24, 2010

Another “don’t pay attention to the facts” editorial

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:47

James Delingpole looks at the long, sad decline of The Economist from a bastion of common sense and rationality to today’s same-as-all-the-rest advocacy publication:

Can anyone tell me how The Economist got its title? I’m guessing it was probably founded in the early 18th century by some crazed charlatan called, perhaps, Zachariah Economist, who, because of the unfortunate coincidence of his surname managed to persuade thousands of gullible fools to part with their shirts on one of the South Sea Bubble companies. The one whose prospectus read “A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”

One thing I know for sure: The Economist’s name can have no relationship whatsoever with the “dismal science” of economics because if it did then never in a million years could it have run an editorial (and feature) as lame, wrong-headed, intellectually dishonest and positively dangerous as the one it produced this week on the subject of Climate Change.

When I started reading The Economist, back in the early 1980s, I was very impressed by the quality of writing and the rather eclectic things they covered every week. I took up a subscription and it was something I never dumped in the garbage (or, later, the recycling bin), as there was always an interested party willing to take it off my hands.

I have to assume either an ownership change or very heavy turnover at the top of the editorial chain happened in the late 1990s, as the “tone” of the coverage changed significantly. The editorials and the choice of articles switched away from a free market emphasis to become much more like a British version of Time or Newsweek. The long-standing defence of free markets dwindled down to the occasional desultory mention of free trade, as they became more pro-state and pro-managed trade. I gave up my subscription a few years after that, as I found I was reading less and less of every issue. Where once I’d read the majority of the articles, at the end, I was just reading the odd editorial, an occasional feature, and the arts and sciences pages at the back.

From what James Delingpole writes, even the science pages have “turned”:

So, let me get this right: as even the Economist admits, scientists don’t really have a clue what the future holds regarding global warming. But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t DO something. Anything is better than nothing.

Let’s transpose that level of lame-brainery to the world of business, shall we? The real, decisions-have-consequences world in which, I imagine, most of The Economist’s readers operate.

So, we currently have a proposed scheme by Global PLC to spend around $45 trillion (that’s the International Energy Agency’s best estimate) combatting a problem which may or may not exist. The potential returns on this investment? Virtually nil. As the Spanish “Green Jobs” disaster has demonstrated, for every Green Job created by government intervention, another 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. It will also shave between 1 and 5 per cent off global GDP, create massive new layers of business-stifling taxation and regulation, and cause energy costs to rise to stratospheric new levels. Nice.

This combines the pro-state preferences of the current editorial group with the “consensus” science of the current science correspondant. I’m glad I gave up my subscription when I did . . .

March 22, 2010

They’ll get away with it ’cause of their cute mascot

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:26

James Delingpole realizes that the Scooby Gang probably won’t be cracking this case, and it’s all because the villians chose a cute mascot:

Today in the Sunday Telegraph my colleague Christopher Booker breaks possibly the most important environmental story since Climategate: a devious plan, truly Blofeldian in its scope and menace, by a hard-left-leaning activist body to gain massive global political leverage and earn stupendous sums of money by exploiting and manipulating the world carbon trading market.

My cynical prediction is that this vitally important story will gain little traction in the wider media, especially not with organisations like the BBC. Why? Because the activist body in question has a lovely, cuddly panda as its motif, and a reputation — brainwashed into children from an early age — for truly caring about the state of our planet. What’s more, this latest campaign by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) is very easy to spin as something unimpeachably noble and right. After all, what kind of fascistic, Gaia-hating sicko would you have to be NOT to applaud a delightful heartwarming scheme to buy up whole swathes of the beauteous, diversity-rich, Na’avi-style, Truffula-tree dotted Amazon rainforest to preserve it for all time from the depredations of evil loggers, cattleranchers and other such profiteering scum?

March 11, 2010

QotD: Green jobs

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:29

[G]reen jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don’t act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I’m pretty sure they’re good for bunions, too.

Megan McArdle, “The Jobs Are Always Greener…”, The Atlantic, 2010-03-11

March 10, 2010

George Monbiot: “There goes my life’s work”

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

As I mentioned when the Climategate scandal started to break, I fear that the misdeeds of climate scientist-activists would rebound against all scientists. George Monbiot seems to be coming around to sharing that concern:

The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science. Writing recently for the Telegraph, the columnist Gerald Warner dismissed scientists as “white-coated prima donnas and narcissists . . . pointy-heads in lab coats [who] have reassumed the role of mad cranks . . . The public is no longer in awe of scientists. Like squabbling evangelical churches in the 19th century, they can form as many schismatic sects as they like, nobody is listening to them any more.”

A small clique of activists managed to temporarily hijack the global agenda, with the potential to destroy untold trillions of dollars of economic development and reduce the freedom of billions of human beings. If the CRU data leak hadn’t taken place, we’d now be looking at massive government intervention in all areas of human existance, far beyond the dreams of power-mad dreamers.

If the threats to human existance were as bad as the CRU and IPCC declared, the actions our governments would have to take would be catastrophic for much of the world. To reduce carbon dioxide emissions to the level the global warming activists deemed appropriate, we’d have to pretty much give up fossil fuels altogether. We’d be condemning billions of people to starvation . . . without modern farming and modern transportation and storage facilities, we couldn’t feed the current population of the world.

To say that this is a setback to science is an understatement, for the actions of those few scientists will make all scientists that much more suspect. Given the alternative of forced curtailment or even abandonment of industrial civilization (and a death toll of unimaginable size) or scientists being given less credence by the public, the latter is by far the lesser evil.

Despite my iconoclastic, anti-corporate instincts, I now spend much of my time defending the scientific establishment from attacks by the kind of rabble-rousers with whom I usually associate. My heart rebels against this project: I would rather be pelting scientists with eggs than trying to understand their datasets. But my beliefs oblige me to try to make sense of the science and to explain its implications. This turns out to be the most divisive project I’ve ever engaged in. The more I stick to the facts, the more virulent the abuse becomes.

This doesn’t bother me — I have a hide like a glyptodon — but it reinforces the disturbing possibility that nothing works. The research discussed in the Nature paper shows that when scientists dress soberly, shave off their beards and give their papers conservative titles, they can reach across to the other side. But in doing so they will surely alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to trust them. As the MMR saga shows, people who mistrust authority are just as likely to kick against science as those who respect it.

Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.

H/T to Elizabeth who wrote “Is Monbiot on the road to Damascus? He hasn’t got there yet but he certainly is starting to question a lot of the greenery.”

March 5, 2010

QotD: Rescuing science from the AGW disaster

Filed under: Environment, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

. . . this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.

A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.

These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.

Eric S. Raymond, “Lies and consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-03-04

March 4, 2010

QotD: The problem with modern journalism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:44

The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.

Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.

This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’ The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.

Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!” They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.

Walter Russell Mead, “Treason is a matter of dates”, The American Interest Online, 2010-03-03

March 3, 2010

That’s not data: that’s collated anecdotes

Filed under: Environment, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

The way things are going, we may need to throw out even more contaminated “data” that has been used to track climate for over a century, because it can’t technically be called anything other than anecdotal:

The network relies on volunteers in the 48 contiguous states to take daily readings of high and low temperatures and precipitation measured by sensors they keep by their homes and offices. They deliver that information to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), which uses it to track changes in the climate.

Requirements aren’t very strict for volunteers: They need a modicum of training and decent vision in at least one eye to qualify. And they’re expected to take measurements seven days a week, 365 days a year.

That’s a recipe for trouble, says Watts, who told FoxNews.com that less scrupulous members of the network often fail to collect the data when they go on vacation or are sick. He said one volunteer filled in missing data with local weather reports from the newspapers that stacked up while he was out of town.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Volunteers take their readings at different times of day, then round the temperatures to the nearest whole number and mark down their measurements on paper forms they mail in monthly to the NCDC headquarters in Ashville, N.C.

“You’ve got this kind of a ragtag network that’s reporting the numbers for our official climate readings,” said Watts, who found that 90 percent of the stations violated the government’s guidelines for where they may be located.

Watts believes that poor placement of temperature sensors has compromised the system’s data. Though they are supposed to be situated in empty clearings, many of the stations are potentially corrupted by their proximity to heat sources, including exhaust pipes, trash-burning barrels, chimneys, barbecue grills, seas of asphalt — and even a grave.

There’s an old saying, frequently used in statistical discussions, that the “plural of anecdote is not data”. This is an excellent example of unreliable information being collated and depended upon as if it was rigorous and objective.

February 25, 2010

Trying to argue someone out of a belief they were never argued into

Filed under: Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Clive sent a link to Lord Monckton’s “Answer to a ‘global warming’ fanatic”:

Dear Enquirer, – Thank you for taking the trouble to write to me. If I may, I shall highlight various passages from your letter in bold face, and then respond to them seriatim in Roman face.

“I am not a climate scientist, and so I can only go by the overwhelming consensus amongst scientists that man-made climate change is occurring and that it poses a grave threat to humanity.”

First, science is not — repeat not — done by consensus. Aristotle, in codifying the dozen worst fallacies to which mankind is prone, described this one as the “head-count fallacy”, or, as the mediaeval schoolmen called it, the argumentum ad populum. Merely because many people say they believe a thing to be true, they do not necessarily believe it to be true and, even if they do, it need not necessarily be true. Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham, the astronomer, mathematician and philosopher of science in 11th-century Iraq who is credited as the father of the scientific method, said this —

“The seeker after truth does not put his faith in any mere consensus, however broad and however venerable. Instead, he subjects what he has learned from it to scrutiny using his hard-won scientific knowledge, and he verifies for himself whether it is true. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.”

More recently, T.H. Huxley, in the famous debate in which he defeated Bishop Soapy Sam Wilberforce in Oxford on the question of evolution, put it this way —

“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the very highest of duties: blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

Secondly, the “consensus” you speak of does not in fact exist. Schulte (2008) reported that, of 539 scientific papers dated January 2004-February 2007 that contained the search phrase “global climate change”, not one provided any evidence that any anthropogenic influence on any part of the climate would prove in any degree catastrophic. That, if you do science by consensus, is the consensus.

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