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How Scientific Consensus Has Gotten a Bad Reputation
nerdyalien writes From the article: "Fiction author Michael Crichton probably started the backlash against the idea of consensus in science. Crichton was rather notable for doubting the conclusions of climate scientists—he wrote an entire book in which they were the villains—so it's fair to say he wasn't thrilled when the field reached a consensus. Still, it's worth looking at what he said, if only because it's so painfully misguided: '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.'" As a STEM major, I am somewhat biased toward "strong" evidence side of the argument. However, the more I read literature from other, somewhat-related fields (i.e. psychology, economics and climate science), the more I felt they have little opportunity to repeat experiments, similar to counterparts in traditional hard science fields. Their accepted theories are based on limited historical occurrences and consensus among the scholars. Given the situation, it's important to understand what "consensus" really means.
Of course I do. Clear explanations are not the problem here.
Climate change science can be turned into an executive summary quickly and easily. These summaries are essentially a bunch of incontestable facts that still get contested.
A. Carbon dioxide provably has much stronger absorption bands in the infra-red wavelengths than Nitrogen, and Oxygen, and a little more than water. These are the only compounds more prevalent in the atmosphere than CO2. You can run experiments in the lab seeing different radiative rates of cooling from different mixtures of "air" and CO2.
B. Paleoclimate reconstructions have show than CO2 concentrations consistently acts as a primary moderator of temperature on earth after the first occurrence of plantlife.
C. Naive modeling shows that substantially increasing the CO2 concentrations from current levels of the atmosphere shift the equilibrium temperatures of the planet substantially. More complex models incorporating other known factors, within the entire range of their uncertainty levels, show the same thing.
D. Human activity has almost doubled CO2 levels.
None of these 4 points are really scientifically questionable, and only naive skepticism(that is, pseudoskepticism) or ignorance leaves much room for debate on them.
Their implications are obvious, and we still get denial, and the problem is not with the structuring, but the behaviors of the deniers.
And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.
I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.
And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.
Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.
So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Climate scientist to layperson: "And here's where things get interesting. CO2 by itself only warms the planet modestly, at about one degree per doubling. We introduced feedbacks into our models which amplify that warming by 300%, turning a fairly benign warming into a dangerous one. This has garnered us a lot of international attention. Unfortunately, nature has not been cooperating and surface temperatures have not increased for the last decade and a half, despite an enormous increase in CO2. Rather than revise controversial feedbacks, we figured out a way to preserve the theory by claiming the deep oceans have absorbed all the extra heat. Since we can't measure the deep oceans with any accuracy it's not falsifiable, and since we don't know if or when the heat will "reappear", we can continue to educate the public for another 50 years even if surface temperatures start to cool."