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Paris Climate Change Talks Yield First Draft (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Negotiators at the UN climate talks in Paris released a draft of an agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. No part of the draft has been finalized as many points remain in contention, particularly between developing countries and more wealthy nations. Laurence Tubiana, the French envoy for the talks, said: "We could have been better, we could have been worse. The job is not done, we need to apply all intelligence, energy, willingness to compromise and all efforts to come to agreement. Nothing is decided until everything is decided."
The draft and addendum .
The most dangerous drug
Suppose 97% of your military commanders came forward and told you they believed that a country would invade.
This is not analogous. The 97% consensus is fraudulent. At best, it is agreement only among climate scientists that there is global warming and that it is mostly human-caused. Once you get away from the sliver of scientists who while most knowledgeable about the situation are also the most beholden, then the consensus drops significantly (for example, Earth scientists had agreement of 90% with the assertion that climate had warmed since 1850 and 82% consensus that most of this change was due to humans).
In particular, this is not a consensus on action to fight climate change or the even stronger target of holding global warming at 2C since 1850! It is interesting how so many people, including you, conflate agreement that most global warming is human-caused (which incidentally I agree with), with some hardcore policy decisions. I am part of the "97%", but I don't agree.
Moving on, there is a great deal of hidden disagreement among climate researchers on the reliability of paleoclimate data, the adjustments made while aggregating that data, and the reliability of climate models to predict future climate. For example, cherrypicking from this survey of climate researchers (from 2008), they found that 26% of those surveyed had absolutely no confidence (a "1" on a scale of 1 to 7) in precipitation predictions for the next 50 years and 33% had a similar absence of confidence in extreme weather predictions over the next 50 years. You don't hear about that when the dire warnings of famine and extreme weather come around, do you?
67% do believe strongly (score 6 or 7) that without mitigation or adaption, there will be catastrophic consequences in the next 50 years.
Moving on, the survey asked an interesting question "The best approach to resolving the problems related to climate change is:" Here, pure mitigation would be "1" and pure adaptation would be "7". A full 30% straddle the fence at "4". 43% favored mitigation to some degree and 27% favored adaptation. Where is the consensus on holding the line at 2C increase since 1850? It doesn't look like 97% to me.
For those who wish to pay attention and learn something about science, this is what happens when you have a manufactured consensus which doesn't actually consider the opinions of the people supposedly polled and stretches the actual claims to claim far more than was actually asked. It's not science, it's an argument from authority fallacy.