At Arstechnica, they say:
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.’
…
In physics, where particles either exist or don’t, five standard deviations are required.
While that makes the standards of evidence sound completely rational, they’re also deeply empirical. Physicists found that signals that were three standard deviations from the expected value came and went all the time, which is why they increased their standard. Biologists haven’t had such problems, but other problems have popped up as new technology enabled them to do tests that covered tens of thousands of genes instead of only a handful. Suddenly, spurious results were cropping up at a staggering pace. For these experiments, biologists agreed to a different standard of evidence.
It’s not like they got together and had a formal vote on it. Instead, there were a few editorials that highlighted the problem, and those pieces started to sway the opinions of not only scientists but journal editors and the people who fund grants. In other words, the field reached a 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.
Full story here
h/t to nerdyalien
Here is a consensus case in point: The book Hundert Autoren Gegen Einstein (A Hundred Authors Against Einstein), is a collection of criticisms of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Published in 1931, it contains short essays from 28 authors, and published excerpts from 19 more. The rest of the 100 against Einstein was a list of 53 people who were also opposed to his theory of relativity for various reasons. 
When asked about this book, Einstein retorted with this:
“Why 100 authors? If I were wrong, then one would have been enough!”
In the case of the ‘Skeptic Science’ claimed ’97 percent’, we have at least three.
Surely that must be enough, unless of course this isn’t about science at all, but about the politics of power, oh, and money.
consensus said the sun rotated around the earth, people were eventually willing to learn and admit they were wrong.
don’t expect the warmers to ever admit that due to funding.
Argue in general about consensus all you want here, the important thing is that a consensus was found from 12,000 scientific papers AND IT IS TRIVIAL and MEANINGLESS to the debate BUT the claim of consensus has been morphed into something it is not.
It’s typical re-re-re definitions of terms that is purely political.
I think it’s more useful to accept the ‘consensus’ and every time it’s brought up to show what IT ACTUALLY IS rather than to go off on tangents about the general validity of any consensus, what the scientific method is, the number of papers ‘refuting’ climate change, etc.
The latter just makes non-skeptics eyes glaze over, the former hits them squarely between them. Focus, people, focus.
Make sure that hits home first, then carry on with everything else.
It is bait and switch for sure. Get consensus on what almost everyone agrees is ‘likely’ and then pretend you have a consensus on something completely different.
Almost all here has ‘consensus’ wrong. By its nature, a consensus on something scientific means there is considerable uncertainty. If it is a dead certainty (the earth goes around the sun), a consensus on it (a show of hands) is meaningless. Now in a complex political situation, where there is no way of knowing whether such and such is the best course of action, or best strategy, it is argued, and there is give and take, compromise, and finally they arrive at what individuals can live with as a course of action, even if not any of them are fully satisfied by it. Yes, the irony of all this talk about consensus is that it means the best they can come up with under the circumstances. Probably among the team, they are close to unanimous on the science – 97% probably. The climategate emails showed the creation of the consensus. Hey they punished those (and still do) who step out of line. They had a consensus on what to do if a journal published a paper not certified by the synod, for example or what to do if one of the unchosen asked for data.
But the Earth-Sun System actually both orbit their mutual gravitational center. Flatly the Earth does not orbit the Sun, but the center of mass of the system, as does the sun. The fact that the sun is so much more massive that the center of mass is inside the sun (but not its center) is of little relevance So the consensus you propose would be wrong. (OK, they actually both orbit the center of mass of all the objects in the solar system, which wobbles around due to the various orbits, but is always inside the sun’s volume.)
See what consensus gets you–there are always skeptics and heretics.
Exactly the point Salby makes in his talk in the UK.
Peer Review: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
I pick Einstein over Mann every time.
It just occurred to me that the ‘CAGW’ team is full of nothing but mediocrity, while the ‘skeptic’ team has several super stars on it’s side. Let’s see Hansen, Mann, Schmidt, Santer, Romm – mediocre science all the way down. I can’t think of a single ‘superstar’ scientist on the CAGW side (that is actually know for their outstanding ‘science’ not their political activism) That versus Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen, Nils-Axel Mörner, William M. Gray, Henrik Svensmark, Christian Schlüchter and many other *leading* experts in their field.
The further “climate science” advances, the more it is apparent how little they really know of what is really out there.
“Consensus” is a group of self-accredited climate experts huddling together in the cold forest in the dark of night, seeking safety in numbers from the marauding Zombies of Denial and ever-prowling Koch Conservative Werewolves, as they eagerly take turns warming their hands with the thermal emissions from a single carbon-neutral solar panel.
It’s a bait and switch argument. Consensus about methods or standards is very different than consensus about conclusions.
If the consensus is that it takes 5 sigma difference to prove X, and my data shows only 2.5 sigma, then my data is rejected. I can get better data or better measurement and increase my confidence to gain acceptance.
However, if the consensus is that the world is warming catastrophically, and data shows that it is not, then consensus cannot be used to refute the fact that it is not catastrophically warming. Refutation must be done with facts
In my opinion, what we have here is some confusion between what a consensus is and what is happening in climate science. As Leif said, consensus has enormous meaning in science. The confusion here is that what we see in the field of climate science is not a consensus. It is a determined effort by a small number of activists to create the perception of a consensus. This is an entirely different matter from having an actual consensus.
Yes, there has to be something specific upon which to base a consensus. Where is a theory published upon which a consensus is in agreement? If the same theory were referenced in a preponderance of climate papers, then we might have a basis for consensus.
For the time being, what they agree upon is vapor. They are all over the map!
There appears to be a consensus on the consensus of consensus on this site; and no consensus on the consensus. (I don’t know what it means either – thanks Gary P.) How do think tanks that outperform computerized results reach a “decision”? Where is the pea?
Of topic slightly, but read the “Alchemy of Air” on how science gets perverted. Nothing new.
Wow – just wow.
So you’re saying the big oil money has swayed the Right away from your consensus.
You do realize that’s a load of crap, right? I mean, BILLIONS of dollars spent manipulating journals, media outlets, end the education system vs. what, $200k spent by “Big Oil” against the consensus?
Looks to me like it’s a question of common sense and reality vs. an absolutely ridiculous and easily debunked LONG since disproved hypothesis… but one that won’t die. There is no “science” about this, since the “science” is completely AGAINST the “consensus”. It’s only about politics, power and money. Only.
As to actual scientific issues, like evolution, the expansion of the universe, fusion in stars producing most of the elements in existence, consensuses arise naturally. Those facts don’t directly affect our lifestyles or politics.
Global warming, as an abstraction, wouldn’t affect us either, but when people use those issues to argue for forced lifestyle changes and political action, the subject is no longer science but politics.
The consensus issue is a real headscratcher when there is no dispute that the last 15 years of temps has not followed almost all of the modeled profiles. The narrative only holds if you say the next 15 years will counter the last 15 so-as to bring the 30-year average into IPCC agreement.
CAGW exists only in the extremes. Somehow this part of the story has become disconnected from the observations to-date. There is no part of the narrative that says extreme weather happens under the current temp rise, yet every strong weather event is said to be CO2 related.
What we have to have is a quick temp drop. I sense the eco-green is worried that this will happen in the next 18 months, before some Green treaty can be nailed down.
I think we have a consensus that we all disagree here!
[trimmed. Again. Stop it. .mod]
Consensus is only a problem when it is used (or misused) to trump facts.
The alarmist crowd refuses to define “consensus”. It means as many different things to them as an elephant does to six blind men. What the alarmist crowd wants to explain to skeptics is: “Shut up!”
“Consensus” is simply a bludgeon used to shout down scientific skeptics — who have the alarmists on the ropes. It is deliberately vague. Because if they specifically defined ‘consensus’, it would be promptly deconstructed for the nonsense it is.
Thats the winning definition:
Because, shut up!
I have a rule for life, “Don’t believe everything you know”. In other words don’t be closed to new ideas, information, proof, evidence, and even truth. Most of what science has known over the entire span of recorded history was later proved untrue or incomplete, though most of those ideas were accepted by the consensus. That being true, it would be incredibly arrogant indeed to think that everything we know right now is true. How is it possible that somehow, right at this moment, everything we know is true? That is very improbable statistically. I submit that there is nothing special about this moment in time, and that most of what we know is also untrue or incomplete. Therefore, “don’t believe everything you know” because that will close your mind to new information, ideas, and truth. Consensus means nothing to me except as a measure of the popularity of a certain theory.
Consensus on what? For example:
Most informed climate scientists think that the world has been warming slowly, in fits and starts, since the Little Ice Age a few centuries ago. So there is consensus on that.
On the other hand, there is very little consensus as to just WHY the world has been warming slowly, in fits and starts, since the Little Ice Age a few centuries ago.
In other words, claiming that there is a “consensus on climate change” is meaningless without detailed specifications.
The most unfortunate and in my opinion most incorrect consensus is the idea that the global temperature is a linear function of the forcing. Even skeptics believe in that sleight of hand … which is why I describe myself as a heretic rather than a skeptic. I hold that the temperature of the earth is maintained by a host of emergent thermoregulatory phenomena … and while to date I’m only part of a small consensus of the select far-seeing few, I have my hopes …
w.
Thermoregulatory? The ‘regulation’ only seems to work at top where climate is astonishingly stable. It’s fine with letting us fall into an abyss of cold though. Otherwise of course I agree. One only has to look at the (apparently) ‘open system’ during ice ages where temperatures fly around wildly to appreciate the narrow well-regulated band at the top where they hardly move at all (implying an obviously very strong negative feedback).
A good point Willis, there are many consensi (consensuses?). About the only thing that is agreed is that it warmed over the last 150 years and a totally unconnected assertion that CO2 in a closed unchaotic test tube can cause warming? The connection between these assertions are speculative at best.
Personally I agree that there are clearly non linear saturation effects operating in the climate, cloud and thunderstorm emergence being two of them. Whether they play a limiting role on the climate – well that is the question isn’t it.
On the consensus, I think the problem here in climate science is trying to assert that there is one, against the overwhelming evidence that there really isn’t one. Instead of admitting they ate all the cookies, the climate scientists have enlisted all their brothers and sisters in order to convince mummy that there are invisible cookies in the jar. The single biggest problem in climate science is that it’s staffed by environmentallist, aberrent personalities that desperstely want to “save the world” – that’s what attracted them to it, it’s science with a cause, science with passion, and that’s the failing – objectiveness has gone out the window and they are pointing at an empty cookie jar pretending that there are invisible cookies in there that noone except the annoited can see.
For example the oft repeated claim that the West Antarctic shelf is melting from climate change, an effect that would cost about 15W/m2 which is only 20 times the energy Hansen said was available from global warming (0.6W/m2). It may be melting, but on the energy numbers, it’s not from CO2 – invisible cookie, it might exist, but its definitely in someone elses jar.
it is a nonsense to suppose a dynamic system such as climate will respond linearly to forcings. what other natural system does? Are there any?
there is perhaps a case that the response will be near linear for very very small changes, simply because a very small increment in a non-linear system can be approximated using a linear function. But this doesn’t mean you can stick these small linear increments together and get a straight line.
In educational and social research (yeh, I know, taint science), consensus is nearly the only game in town. And it shifts. Is it slow to shift? You bet. Too slow for me? Yep. Too slow for parents? Yep. But the research results are not iron clad. There is no litmus test for educational outcomes or social interventions (and here I mean interventions related to social skills or interventions related to group think problems like the Jim Jones thing). So do we throw the baby out with the dirty water?
Consensus is a part of science and is abused. What part of that surprises anyone? At issue here is the idea that one bad apple (or is that 97) spoils the brew so you throw the whole baby out. Not good. An equally opposite reaction to a problem is seldom productive.
To reason with moderation is the high ground.
The bad guys in Chricton’s great book were corrupt environmentalists and lawyers and stupid Hollywood types.
So the sssay is a lie from the get go.
No different from the work of most climate fear promoters, actually.
And as to consensus, Feynman, Einstein, and other pseudo-scientists all promote the idea that consensus is bad science.
What a disgusting defense by Arstechnica and the rest of the climate kooks and apologists.
“It’s impossible to attribute superior or lesser intelligence to conservatives or progressives…”
Ahem..
Global warming was a global IQ test with results permanently recorded on the Internet. The Professional Left from one side of the planet to the other failed.
Can you name a single prominent “progressive” who has not permanently shamed themselves with AGW advocacy? You can scrub like lady Macbeth, you can even use the sandpaper, but the putrescent stain of AGW advocacy is permanent and the shame of vilifying sceptics in an attempt to silence the truth will burn forever.
Either our radiative atmosphere (excepting pressure) has a net cooling effect on the surface or it has a net warming effect. Black or white, right or wrong. There can be no “soft landing” for the hoax. Your fellow travellers will not be slinking off to a UN sponsored “BioCrisis” or a manufactured fresh water crisis. Sceptics will never forgive and the Internet will never forget.
You have taken your political pot-shot and said “back to the science”, so I will take one last political shot and leave it. The so called “progressives” have made the greatest political blunder in history. When the SS Leftardula was taking too long to get to port Fabia, along came the SS Global Warming, with it’s powerful pseudo science engines, and every last fellow traveller jumped ship. Now you have hit the iceberg of truth and are sinking with all rodents. There will be no escape. Sceptics have smashed every lifeboat and the Internet has welded every hatch shut. Down you go…
Heh. The smartest Leftist in the world, yes, Noam Chomsky, has this to say
“The likely end of the era of civilization is foreshadowed in a new draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the generally conservative monitor of what is happening to the physical world. ”
http://www.alternet.org/world/chomsky-americas-obsession-destroys-earths-climate
He also thinks that the world is still warming. Hasn’t checked in 17 years obviously.
Of all the “progressive” blatheratti, there is a special joy to be had in the utter destruction of Chomsky’s drivel. His reputation was built on years of bleating that evil conservatives and capitalists were “manufacturing consent”, but the crushing reality is that his fellow travellers and their useful idiots were the ones provably “manufacturing consensus”…
Moaning Noam, hoist by his own petard. Delicious 😉
Konrad said:
“Can you name a single prominent “progressive” who has not permanently shamed themselves with AGW advocacy?”
Yes, for instance: Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, Co-Author of “The neglected Sun” is a member and former politician of the leftist German party SPD. Also Helmut Schmidt, a former German chancellor from the same party, is an outspoken skeptic in this matter.
But it is fair to claim that there are more CAGW-Believers on the left political side than on the right. However, there are many CAGW-Followers from this political corner as well, at least in Europe. Thus, the “Right/Left-Division” is not a very helpful category here; it’s rather a question of “independence of mind”…
Further, it’s to hard to say, the state of believing in CAGW should be an absolute test of IQ, because many intelligent people have simply not enough scientific knowledge to make their own assessment about the validity of this hypothesis. It’s more a test of their ability resisting the social pressure of conformism.
For the record, I have never yet met a “progressive” that can’t quote some Chomsky, and they ALL think Chomsky has increased their understanding of the world and improved their lives. But that’s okay, I am also aware that many “progressives” are unaware of what they are, and some even think their “progressive” outlooks have any validity beyond mere echos of anti-Vietnam sentiment from the 60s.
Wow – that just slid by with no comment. Someone advanced the theory (never observed) of evolution as some consensus fact, others raised objection, and nobody came to the rescue of evolution-as-fact.
Things are looking up amongst this group of scientifically minded ppl. Projecting backward is pretty much the same as predicting forward.
Artificial selection has produced a vast array of canine freaks, the majority of which wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving and reproducing in the wild.
Even if, like Darwin, you had no understanding of the genetic code behind the mechanism, you would have to acknowledge that selection pressures from the environment shape the organism over multiple generations. The only difference between artificial selection (“eugenics” if you prefer ) and “natural” selection is the part of the environment that does the culling.
A mere 100 years of domestic canine “improvements”:
http://dogbehaviorscience.wordpress.com/2012/09/29/100-years-of-breed-improvement/
You don’t need consensus to be convinced of evolution: you just need to look at the mountains and oceans full of evidence. That’s probably why people who think evolution is the explanation best fitted to the evidence don’t invoke “consensus” as an “argument.”
Evolution is the 2nd most successful theory in science.
In the same way that “climate change” is used as shorthand that isn’t properly specified, a lot of times “evolution” is treated the same way.
“Evolution”, to a creationist, is the specific assertion that the species of man arose from monkeys in a defined step by step fashion.
“Evolution”, to a layman, is the assertion that species magically transform in positive ways in response to the environment, starting with amoeba from Fantasia, working their way up until they reach the pinnacle of humans.
“Evolution”, to a scientist, is the assertion that through the mechanism of natural selection, a separated group of a given species can genetically drift through mutation and selective pressures to the point where the original group (not subject to the same pressures or the same mutations) no longer can breed/produce viable offspring with the separated group. Whether or not the separated group is “better” is a question nature doesn’t care about – the group doesn’t need to be stronger, or faster, or smarter, it just has to have avoided the particular selective pressure that killed off the other competing genetic lines.
So really, when we talk about “evolution”, we *really* mean “genetic drift and selective pressures” – both of which, as you rightly point out, happen with “artificial” selection (nature doesn’t care *where* the selective pressure comes from – calling one “natural” and one “artificial” is a trope of hubris).
As for why the theory of genetic drift and selective pressures is scientific (as compared to the pseudo-science of AGW), is that genetic drift and selective pressures is *falsifiable*. The trivial example of the falsifiability is to find a modern rabbit in the precambrian, which would demonstrate, if found, something miraculous like time travel or an alien seeding our planet hundreds of millions of years ago. Another example would be finding an organism which never has any mutations during genetic reproduction, ever. The most thoroughly sci-fi-ish example would be finding such a never-mutating organism, that has sufficient genetic code to express an infinite variety of phenotypes with the same genotype, adapting phenotypically to selective pressures without ever changing genetically.
Alan McIntire sez “As to actual scientific issues, like evolution, the expansion of the universe, fusion in stars producing most of the elements in existence, consensuses arise naturally. Those facts don’t directly affect our lifestyles or politics.”
Alan – the subtitle of The Origin of Species” was “The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”.
That is a fact.
What is also a fact is our horrible history of eugenics arose out of this hubris – leading from England to USA and from USA straight to Hilter and the Final Solution, and all of the forced-sterilization programs from the powerful onto the powerless in the USA and across the globe – mostly focused on dark-skinned inferior people.
Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact. Fact.
This view of evolution as some revelation saving us from the terror of religion is a huge, horrible faith-based myth.
Of course, since I am white, this obvious “fact” of evolution doesn’t affect me or my people. So, essentially, your comment is accurate – for me and my kind.
Well somebody mentioned the consensus on Dark Matter as example of where consensus is “perfectly valid [and necessary]”.
A few months ago I travelled on the train where I had the pleasure of talking to a physicist who had worked at CERN. So I asked him for an explanation of the Higgs field, and his opinion about Dark Matter. I mentioned my conviction that a magneto-rotational instability could explain the rotational properties of rotating disks of matter in space. He expressed his conviction that MOND would explain it.
Neither of us believed in Dark Matter.
Maybe he was a bad physicist.
Both of you were pushing Convictions. That is not science and thus both of you qualify as bad physicists in my book.
Rubbish, you of all people should know. You yourself have your convictions that the solar signal is too weak to explain global warming – that is a “conviction” and you might be right, however someone else like me might say “Well it is not altogether proven that emergent effects across all wavelength of light are similar and that a vatiation in the spectral distribution of light may have a significant effect” perhaps my conviction is right Leif. A conviction is simply an alternative belief, an alternative hypothesis, alternative hypotheses cause science to advance. You are a bad scientist if you dont have them
No, I don’t have any convictions. I do not have the conviction that the solar signal is too weak to explain global warming. The data tells me that, regardless of what I may want to believe. And I don’t have beliefs about this. If somebody can show me that the signal produces a significant response above the error bar, I’ll accept their analysis, but so far nobody has.
Leif – is this true? Do you actually think you don’t have any convictions? You’re not just pulling our legs?
I don’t have any convictions about science. I have lots of convictions about many other things, like freedom, honesty, etc.
In science, data trumps conviction, so better not have any. Follow the data.
Dark Matter is a conviction as long as it has not been found.
Well, it has been found, all around us. 80% of the matter of the Universe is Dark.
God would be Matter or Dark Matter or both?
I don’t think so. Dark Matter responds to gravity. Your god is probably above that 🙂
Actually Leif, I think you do. You think you are following the data, but you don’t know all the mechanisms that link solar influences to weather. Your interpretation of the data is therefore ignorant of the transfer functiom between solar and terrestrial weather. You hold the belief that solar influences are too weak to explain climate change in spite of your ignorance about a large chunk, that is what happens between the sun and the temperature emerging on earth. Rather than assert that you don’t know for sure, but it appears to be true, you proclaim full knowledge that the solar influence is certainly too weak – I claim you know too little to say that with any certainty because science lacks knowledge of all the mechanisms. That makes your declaration a belief (or conviction), it may be probable, but it is by no means a fact.
As a scientist one should be aware of the progression of competence
Unconcious incompetence – we don’t know what we don’t know
Conscious incompetence – we do know what we don’t know.
Conscious competence – we think we know what we know, but we are still working on it.
Unconcious competence – we know for sure and use it without question
Where are we currently incompetent about the Solar influence on the weather? Almost everywhere. For example the top of the sunspot cycle has major electrical effects on the ionosphere, how does that influence our environment?
Before one begins to think about mechanisms and unknown unknowns there should be a response to be explained, and as far as I am concerned, there is no response, there is no clear indication that the solar signal has a significant climate response. Lots of claims, but none that survive scrutiny.
So God is energy ? Dark energy or just energy ?
Leif Svalgaard
September 10, 2014 at 12:05 am
“Well, it has been found, all around us. 80% of the matter of the Universe is Dark.”
Okay, you say it has been found. Is it neutrinos, WIMPS, MACHOs? Which one is it?
Leif, you don’t even notice that you mistake a bundle of competing sub-hypotheses of the Dark Matter hypothesis for evidence.
Well, it has been found, all around us. 80% of the matter of the Universe is Dark.
=============
or that our theory of gravity is incomplete.
has anyone ever shown us a single particle of dark matter? or is dark matter a hypothesis to explain the differences between gravitational theory and observation?
Dark Matter is not a product of our Theory of Gravitation. That we don’t know what DM is is not an objection. Newton clearly stated that he did not know the cause of Gravity, yet gravity certainly exists. You may benefit from a study of http://www.leif.org/EOS/CosmicSoundWaves.pdf about how to measure the density of baryons versus that of DM, which does not depend on any theories of gravitation.