Is climate change controversy good for science?

Lindzen’s insight is timeless
http://www.azquotes.com/quote/1386476

A better question would be, is the practice seen in climate ‘science’ good for science in general. The answer to which is a big fat no. Pal or self ‘review’ seen in this article is merely one of the many problems that has meant that poor scientific practice is no merely acceptable but positively rewarded.

Science doesn’t care for debates nor does it care for opinions or qualifications. Throughout history there have been Popes, Churches, Kings, Despots, Nobel laureates, Science Leaders and public opinion against findings of science and it did not care a less. General Relativity and QM are examples of theories are the establish science theories despite what probably most of the world population and some scientists think of them. No body has ever been able to prove them wrong and they have made predictions classic physics gets totally wrong so they stand.
Where climate science is failing is it is trying to force closure of argument based on what is really a political agenda. You see scientists still having to talk to audiences about QM and it is coming up to 100 years since it’s discovery and is the most proven theory we have in science, which has no competing theories to it. Yet probably 90% of the audience will still not believe and we don’t call for rounding up or prosecution of the non believers.
What is strange is watching something that calls itself a science acting in a way that is unscientific and dare we say dictatorial way.

The academic scam is healthy and growing where you review my work favorably and I review yours the same – it’s called ‘pal review’. Also, I bestow honors upon you and you return the favor; I create symposia and invite you to deliver the keynote address and you reciprocate, always at some exotic location with travel paid for by govt. grants. We provide each other with endless opportunities to engorge our bogus bio’s making it easy to receive grant $$$ and get promotions and awards. An on and on until retirement. The academic scam paradigm is passed on to our graduate students who proceed to perfect it.
Enough already!

Jack, here are some examples of consensus that was overturned by a single person,but sometimes took decades to a century for Consensus error to be noticed:
J.Harlan Bretz is one such man who had to fight for FIFTY years against the prevailing UNIFORMITARIANISM doctrine (Consensus), to show what caused the Channeled Scabland in Eastern Washington,
1) J Harlen Bretz
And The Great Scabland Debate
Sean D. Pitman, M.D.
© April 2004
“One of the most interesting debates in the history of geology has to do with the origins of the Channeled Scabland region in eastern Washington State – so named by J Harlen Bretz because of the region’s distinctive channels with intervening “scabs” of loess or soil covering the underlying basaltic rock. But how, exactly, were these channels and scabs formed? Were they formed over millions of years of time by process of erosion currently active in the region or were they formed by some other means?
By the time of the early twentieth century, the most prominent scientists of the day were decidedly “uniformitarian” in their thinking.1,2 That is, they believed that the regular observed processes of usual geologic events acting over vast periods of time were able to explain most if not all of the observed geologic record. J Harlen Bretz, who earned his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago, was the first geologist to seriously challenge this notion, but it was by no means an easy. The process to change the prevailing dogma of the day was a tremendous struggle for Bretz despite his use of a great deal of very good evidence – and that is what is most interesting about this story.
Many people think that scientists are dispassionate in their investigations, conclusions and their general search for truth. As we will soon discover, most scientists have always been very passionate people who, just like most of the rest of us, do not like to admit a long-held error even in the face of otherwise overwhelming evidence.”
Harlan had to fight against that long held consensus,which he succeeded after a few decades with evidence that became so overwhelming that it was finally admitted even by the most dogmatic geologists of the day as show here when he was recognized for his work:
“Bretz’s remarkable work was built painstakingly over many years, but he had to fight great opposition for many decades for its final acceptance. Finally, in 1979, the geological establishment publicly acknowledged Bretz’s work by awarding him the prestigious Penrose Medal – the most prestigious honor in the field of geology.3 Bretz was in his late 90s, and had been holding the line for more than 50 years before finally realizing general acceptance of his “insane” catastrophic model for the formation of the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington State.”
http://www.detectingdesign.com/harlenbretz.html
2) When Continental Drift Was Considered Pseudoscience
By Richard Conniff
Smithsonian Magazine
June 20012
“It was a century ago this spring that a little-known German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents had once been massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart. He was, of course, right. Continental drift and the more recent science of plate tectonics are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer vital questions like where to find precious oil and mineral deposits, and how to keep San Francisco upright. But in Wegener’s day, geological thinking stood firmly on a solid earth where continents and oceans were permanent features.
We like to imagine that knowledge advances fact upon dispassionate fact to reveal precise and irrefutable truths. But there is hardly a better example of just how messy and emotional science can be than Wegener’s discovery of the vast, turbulent forces moving within the earth’s crust. As often happens when confronted with difficult new ideas, the establishment joined ranks and tore holes in his theories, mocked his evidence and maligned his character. It might have been the end of a lesser man, but as with the vicious battles over topics ranging from Darwinian evolution to climate change, the conflict ultimately worked to the benefit of scientific truth.
The idea that smashed the old orthodoxy got its start on Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) browsed through a friend’s new atlas. Others before him had noticed that the Atlantic coast of Brazil looked as if it might once have been tucked up against West Africa, like a couple spooning in bed. But no one had made much of it, and Wegener was hardly the logical choice to show what they had been missing. He was a lecturer at Marburg University, not merely untenured but unsalaried, and his specialties were meteorology and astronomy, not geology.
But Wegener was not timid about disciplinary boundaries, or much else. He was an Arctic explorer and a record-setting balloonist, and when his scientific mentor and future father-in-law advised him to be cautious in his theorizing, Wegener replied, “Why should we hesitate to toss the old views overboard?”
He cut out maps of the continents, stretching them to show how they might have looked before the landscape crumpled up into mountain ridges. Then he fit them together on a globe, like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, to form the supercontinent he called Pangaea (joining the Greek words for “all” and “earth”). Next he assembled the evidence that plants and animals on opposite sides of the oceans were often strikingly similar: It wasn’t just that the marsupials in Australia and South America looked alike; so did the flatworms that parasitized them. Finally, he pointed out how layered geological formations often dropped off on one side of an ocean and picked up again on the other, as if someone had torn a newspaper page in two and yet you could read across the tear.
Wegener called his idea “continental displacement” and presented it in a lecture to Frankfurt’s Geological Association early in 1912. The minutes of the meeting noted that there was “no discussion due to the advanced hour,” much as when Darwinian evolution made its debut. Wegener published his idea in an article that April to no great notice. Later, recovering from wounds he suffered while fighting for Germany during World War I, he developed his idea in a book, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in German in 1915. When it was published in English, in 1922, the intellectual fireworks exploded.
Lingering anti-German sentiment no doubt intensified the attacks, but German geologists piled on, too, scorning what they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. At a Royal Geographical Society meeting, an audience member thanked the speaker for having blown Wegener’s theory to bits—then thanked the absent “Professor Wegener for offering himself for the explosion.”
But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift. A paleontologist called it “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication.” Wegener’s lack of geological credentials troubled another critic, who declared that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them.” He then produced his own cutout continents to demonstrate how awkwardly they fit together. It was geology’s equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s glove.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-continental-drift-was-considered-pseudoscience-90353214/
It took FORTY years before his basic hypothesis gained support,but ONLY after those Consensus loving old geologists died off.
“The turnabout on his theory came relatively quickly, in the mid-1960s, as older geologists died off and younger ones began to accumulate proof of seafloor spreading and vast tectonic plates grinding across one another deep within the earth.”
There are many more examples of Consensus failures. I never read Thomas Kuhn talking about consensus failures in his book,have you Jack?
Science runs on Reproducible research,not Consensus.That is what many science illiterates like you never understand.