Quote of the Week – Consensus

Brilliant.
I’ll probably get sacked if I can be identified (northern New South Wales) but recently there was a consensus at the provincial university where I work as a part-time librarian that an academic who wrote a humerous poem supporting another very talented academic who’d been sacked after student complaints, was himself sacked.
A poem. Yep, these days you can be sacked for writing a poem in PC academia. The Vice Chancellor described my neighbour’s poem as a “reprehensible elegy”! Needless to say I congratulated my neighbour on being the first man to have ever been sacked for writing a “reprehensible elegy”.
Just in passing, why do students evaluate teachers these days? Back in my day teachers evaluated students.

excellent definition!

This is a valuable “quotable quote”, not just for the week but for some time to come, I think.

I predict that the consensus on WUWT will be to agree with that remark. The major difference being that it will remain to be true at the individual level.

I rather prefer to “break it down” by looking at each part of the word. (Euphemistically, of course.)
Con = being against
sense = facts
us = inclusive group
Therefore, a consensus is those that are against facts.

In the context of science, the late Michael Crichton said that when scientists say “the consensus is …”, it means they simply don’t know.
Pointman

If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn’t thinking. – George S. Patton

Remember the consensus view was germs did not cause infections.

It seems our friends at the PBS NewsHour have basic comprehension problems with the concept:
“PBS NewsHour: Against scientific consensus before they were for it” http://junkscience.com/2012/09/28/pbs-newshour-against-scientific-consensus-before-they-were-for-it/#more-31736

“Some psychology researchers argue that a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals—but are nonetheless false.”
“Some researchers are optimistic that many published findings will be replicated. But others are concerned that if the project confirms few studies, it could unfairly indict psychology. Indeed, the prospect of exposing psychology’s foibles has upset some scientists.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6076/1558.summary
Oh dear, the poor little darlings!
“The most startling thing about the latest scandal to hit social psychology isn’t the alleged violation of scientific ethics itself, scientists say, or the fact that it happened in the Netherlands, the home of fallen research star and serial fraudster Diederik Stapel, whose case shook the field to its core less than a year ago. Instead, what fascinates them most is how the new case, which led to the resignation of psychologist Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus University Rotterdam and the requested retraction of two of his papers by his school, came to light: through an unpublished statistical method to detect data fraud.
“If it proves valid, Simonsohn’s technique might find other possible cases of misconduct lurking in the vast body of scientific literature.
“Simonsohn already created a stir last year with a paper in Psychological Science showing that it’s “unacceptably easy” to prove almost anything using common ways to massage data and suggesting that a large proportion of papers in the field may be false positives.”
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/07/fraud-detection-tool-could-shake.html
There is a consensus among psychologists that their work may be exposed as “cases of misconduct lurking in the vast body of scientific literature.” I wonder what other body of scientific literature this method of detecting data fraud could be applied to?

Wiki definition: Consensus decision-making is a group decision making process that seeks the consent [within the group]
Business Dictionary: Consensus depends on participants having shared values and goals, [within the group.]
So long as the consensus operation and agreement stays within the group it is entirely valid.
A problem arises when the group then proceeds to operate as though the consensus is valid outside the group, outside the domain of their group’s shared values and goals. When a group making the consensus sought consent within the group, then ignores, stifles, and overrules dissent from those outside the group, it ceases to be consensus and becomes mob rule.

“Consent of the governed” is a phrase synonymous with a political theory wherein a government’s legitimacy and moral right to use state power is only justified and legal when derived from the people or society over which that political power is exercised.

What is the legitimate link between the group consensus and consent of the governed? The only consensus with legitimacy to use state power is the elected Legislative branch of government. All other groups must take their consensus to that elected group to earn the elected body’s consent.

The term ‘consensus science’ is a self-contradiction, except when Ravetz et al are involved in re-defining science.
John

One of the most useful concepts I took from business management studies was the Comfortable Clone Syndrome (h/t Harvard Business Review).
Generally, managers have two responses to this phenomenon. On the one hand, managers who dislike conflict—or value only their own approach—actively avoid the clash of ideas. They hire and reward people of a particular stripe, usually people like themselves. Their organizations fall victim to what we call the comfortable clone syndrome: coworkers share similar interests and training; everyone thinks alike. Because all ideas pass through similar cognitive screens, only familiar ones survive. For example, a new-business development group formed entirely of employees with the same disciplinary background and set of experiences will assess every idea with an unvarying set of assumptions and analytical tools. Such a group will struggle to innovate, often in vain.
My personal observations are that pro-AGW folks seem more likely to fall foul of this than the anti-AGW crowd.

Consensus can be the most dangerous thing for any science. It stifles curiosity and questioning – the very source of discovery and invention. Without skepticism we would still be hanging witches.

” I have a red pencil box”
Benny Hill

LOL! Reminds of a story by Uncle Miltie & Aunty Rose (from Free to Choose, I think):
A Chemist, a Physicist & and an Economist are stranded on a desert island. Between them, they have a pocket knife, a few cans of baked beans and a small plastic tarp. The Chemist & Physicist are pretty confident that by carving a quick awl & divit fire starter, and pooling their shoelaces for a bow string, they can get a small driftwood fire going. The Chemist offers that he can approximate the boiling point of the beans from first principles & his knowledge of the boiling point of water at sea level. The Physicist continues, saying that she can calculate the pressure inside the cans at boiling point, and if they can weaken the perimiter of the can top, she can calculate the velocity of the beans as they explode from the cans, and then by using ballistics, determine where they should place the tarp to collect them.
Why all the fuss?, asks the Economist. Let’s just assume we have a can opener.

Recently, listening to a TV news broadcast, a NASA spokeswoman announced that Curiosity had enabled the identification of Martian geology consistent with past sedimentary deposition in water, in this case an ancient stream bed. She waxed lyrical that the ‘consensus’ of scientists agreeing that Mars once had flowing water.
In post-modern science consensus drives the validity of the conclusion. Evidence is a side-show. In this case, the geological evidence of past fluvial processes on Mars, present day glacial flow and neutron spectrometry – all garnered from orbit, have provided the evidence that demonstrates the presence of water on Mars, ever before Curiosity arrived at Gale Crater, yet it was the consensus that was cited as the clincher, not the evidence, spun around the recent publicity surrounding NASA’s Curiosity.
The Concept of Consensus is unrelated to evidence. Second hand smoke demonstrates that nicely.
In a real sense, consensus is ‘group-think’ or ‘collectivist thinking’. It is thinking by ‘committee’. And therein lies the catch, well described by the words Robert Heinlein once wrote that, ‘the intelligence of a committee is inversely proportional to its number’.

Curious, with all the consensus, has anyone gone back and checked what the old climate models have said that the temperature would be like for this past decade. I read this blog every so often it is nice to read intelligent people having decent arguments over science.

Consensus is the refuge of the ignorant and the lazy; and yet, it is also a way to get things done in a self-contained group. As a former university department head, I often had my department work toward achieving a consensus on a course of action to meet particular situations or needs. When consensus was reached, we had a firm basis for proceeding to act, and in most cases the action was appropriate and effective. We did not, of course, attempt consensus on first principles, scientific or historical facts, or other matters beyond departmental limits. (I might add that my department was highly professional, with no territorial jealousies, and very careful of the interests of the students. I do realize how rare that situation is.)

There’s a word for consensus decisions in engineering.
It’s called ‘failure’

Is it at all possible that the consensus on AGW line is a bad sales job for a different issue all together?
Although it is hard to believe that politicians are/were that foresighted and career wise long lived, those below them making the real decisions and policies tend to be more realistic and longer in the job.
While I have no time for the AGW theory in both cause and effect, reflecting on the needs for an eventual future without fossil fuels is a different issue altogether.
Based on current known reserves and consumption: 60 odd years for oil, about 250 years for coal and depending on how shale gas and fracking goes anything from 100 to 500 years of gas. Once the oil is gone the life of the other 2 will reduce quickly and yes we will find more of all 3 just like the population is projected to grow by another 25% or more.
Changing our energy sources soon will be easy compared to the other changes to be made once the fossil fuels are mostly gone.
Energy production, including fuel for transport, consumes the vast majority of the fossil fuels extracted. The balance, about 20 to 25% depending on which report you read, is used for a myriad of industrial uses from fertilizer production to plastics and nylons to surfactants and so on.
We can substitute the feedstocks for most of these industrial uses with renewable sources, plant oils in particular, and where we can’t we can substitute the end product itself. The reality is that we do not have the land available, even when we cut down every tree and flatten every mountain, to obtain enough of these needed renewables for industrial purposes, feed the soon to be 9 odd billion people and keep our current lifestyle. Just think about the corn for ethanol scheme, how much land that took, the food problems and resulting price increases that created, similar with soya bean production as fuel alternative in Brazil. All that for only a fraction of the world requirement and when you take the fossil fuels required to get those 2 alternatives to a usable form we find that the net result was virtually nil. But it showed that politicians were doing something and that meant votes.
Wool, wood cellulose and cotton are good alternatives to the nylon, polyester and polypropylene fabrics and carpets of today but the land needed to obtain the quantities required brings us back again to that land not being used for food production. And yes, we can eat the sheep after shearing but we won’t have the wool next season. A warmer world on the other hand would do away with the need for us to get dressed and grass skirts will do for modesty purposes.
The good news with this farming revival will be that the taxpayer does not have to support the farmer with subsidies any longer, those funds will then be needed to help reduce the cost of food to the consumer. We can call it the “consumer food subsidy”, it might make us all feel better. Supporting a few farmers with billions of dollars from all of us is so outdated.
Changing our energy production to nuclear and renewables will leave the fossil fuels available to be used for industrial purposes for centuries to come without the need to divert land use away from food production.
Even if oil (gas?) is abiotic (quite possible) there is not enough produced this way to replenish what we extract.
Changing our energy sources largely, if not completely, over the next 40 or so years, may be the lesser of two evils although the other option would help to reduce the population quite a bit. The greens will stop further forests being cut down to make way for the required food and industrial production and the poor will starve, which of course will also end the land use problem, a reduced population is preferred by them anyway plus then there is more land available for crop production.
So, is it at all possible that the powers to be back in the late 70’s when all this AGW nonsense first appeared had a vision of this, with far less known fossil fuel reserves compared to today, but just had no clue how to galvanize the general public quickly into action and chose the wrong marketing approach.
Basing it on “drama sells” and knowing that the temp cycle was on the way up it all looked promising and easier than to say: “we are going to run out of oil” when the next 3 billion barrel field was found (about 1 month of world supply at the current consumption rate).
What they did not count on was that the climate facts would undermine the sales pitch at every turn.
But how do you now sell the concept of ” trust us, AGW was a hoax but eventual fossil fuel shortage is real”?

outtheback says:
September 30, 2012 at 11:15 am
But how do you now sell the concept of ”trust us, AGW was a hoax but eventual fossil fuel shortage is real”?
You never have to sell concepts, you sell products, right? And none of the products you have described really needs “fossil fuels” to be produced, neither they need crop land area. What they do need, according to our understanding of basic physics is the elements Carbon and Hydrogen, some Oxygen perhaps (along with minor amounts of other elements) plus free energy. Nothing else. It does not matter if the free energy comes from the raw material itself or from somewhere else.
Of these basic constituents Carbon is the least abundant in rocks, still, we have some
5×10¹⁵ tonnes (2.5×10⁴⁴ atoms) of it in the easily accessible upper mile of crust. We do know from thermodynamics that free energy needed to extract an element from a mixture is proportional to the logarithm of its abundance. Therefore if we had free energy enough (and we were crazy), we could add as much methane to the atmosphere as to increase surface pressure twofold. In other words, it is far more than plenty.
And methane is an excellent starting point for any kind of carbon chemistry.
Anyway, if we wanted to produce that much methane, some 2×10²⁷ Joules of free energy would be needed. Now, we do have about 1.5×10¹³ tonnes of Thorium in the same upper mile. That’s 10³⁰ Joules, 500 times more than needed to create that lethal and absolutely dangerous atmosphere.
Now, what we actually need to replace fossil fuels for millions of years is only a tiny little fraction of resources we have. There is no problem whatsoever, is there?
Yup, technology. But we still have a century to get there while the path is pretty clear, already. Efficient reactors based on the Thorium cycle are entirely possible, with inherent safety and no long half life waste, unlike the dangerous Cold War Plutonium factories we currently have, supplying some pathetic energy output as a byproduct. As for extraction and chemistry of whatever we may need, advanced molecular nanotechnology with its programmable self replicating molecular machinery is well on its way to reality. For God’s sake, what was the market value of a laptop with internet connection in 1912?
Have some vision, please, work hard and don’t ponder much on cities buried below heaps of horse manure.

Berenyi
As per above I have no problem with nuclear whatsoever, let alone Thorium. Sounds better to me than fouling the atmosphere with SF6 to produce solar panels
Realistically though, I think you will be hard pushed to get all, or even most, energy from Thorium reaction in those countries currently most vocal about AGW, something to do with democracy. It will take some convincing of the public and while they happily follow the AGW high priests based on a model they will need real life evidence (data) that Thorium reactors are safe in the long term.
Thorium is certainly more abandoned then Uranium but that does not mean that it’s extraction is free of costs. There is no free energy, if that is what you meant with free energy.
Yes we can strip all the carbon out of the soil, the top layer, as you suggest and then convert that to the various synthetics required. Depending on the cost of energy at the time it will likely be more costly then the current method.
Stripping carbon out of the soil would not leave the planet a happy place but certainly possible. We better not want to use that land again for food production.
What I am saying is change our source for energy soon and leave the fossil fuel in the ground to be used for industrial conversion, we will have to change energy source sooner or later anyway and it will give us more time to get the alternatives for the industrial conversion under control.
To do this it needs the public to buy into it as the costs will be higher or (perceived to be) more dangerous, so it needs to be sold. Let’s say the public needs to be motivated to want to pay more for the energy used and that is what AGW is priming them for, but why not tell it the way it is if there is indeed another reason behind the AGW drivel?

“The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.” – George Bernard Shaw

Consensus is the inverse of science.