Consensus Does Not Imply Truth

Despite Al Gore's claim that the consensus is that global warming is All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans©, the inconvenient truth is that there is no consensus. Too many respected climatologists, meteorologists, and other climate scientists disagree, saying that there is not enough data or that the models used to process the data are seriously flawed. Some dissenters are saying that humans have had little, if any effect on the climate and that what changes have been seen are part of a natural process.

Moonbattery has a number of links that names names of those standing up against the so-called consensus that all global warming is caused by humans. Many do not deny there is some kind of global climate change, but they do not look at humans as the cause. After all, climate change has been an ongoing phenomenon since Earth has had an atmosphere. Too many people seem to think that normal climate is what they've been experiencing during their lifetimes or the lifetimes of their parents or grandparents. But within the past 2000 years the climate worldwide has been both warmer and cooler than it has been over the past 100 years.

So what is considered 'normal' in regards to climate? I guess it depends upon each period of time one is talking about. Perhaps we should be speaking about average climate versus normal. But what would the
response of the It's-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans cabal if they found out the average climate for any given area on Earth is warmer than it is presently? Would they then be guilty of promoting global cooling to keep global temperatures below the' average' temperatures? It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it?

All of that notwithstanding, Al Gore's claim that there is scientific consensus should be a warning, not the end of the argument for or against anthropogenic global warming. As author and physician Michael Crichton said:

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus…

So consensus as Al Gore defines it means nothing when it comes to science, because science can not be legislated nor defined by ideology, such as Al Gore's. Science must stand on its own, and so it is with the science of global climate change.