Isn't it an agenda to call the consensus reality an "agenda"? I'm not being facetious, but that discourse has fallen the point where simple statements of reality are politicized has dumbed the entire discourse.
I can only speak for myself, but analogously, I have no disagreement when the anti-vaccination contingent paints the rest of us as having an "agenda" when we post stories about horrible flu outbreaks. Herd immunity and total extinction of certain viruses are definitely an "agenda" I will own up to supporting.
Calling it a consensus reality is also showing an agenda - trying to make it sound more certain than it is, which is to push the agenda of saving people from possible harm of future climate change by fooling them into believing it's certain because they're not competent enough to assess the risk of uncertain things. I'm not complaining about trying to do good, but it's not science, it's belief and it might be wrong.
The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.
> The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently
Um what? I feel like you haven't spent 10 minutes in a physics class. As someone who spent many years studying physics, you have to get within range of the quantum level before people in that field start feeling a little shaky in their beliefs.
The history of consensuses? Yes, please, you should do that, because it has gotten us quite far given the constraints of time. There are so many crackpot ideas that are thankfully rarely explored due to consensus.
Things that were described confidently for centuries (or less):
1. The earth is flat.
2. The sun revolves around the earth.
3. Fire is an element.
4. They have chemical/nuclear weapons.
5. No one can enter the search market; AltaVista owns the market.
6. Pets.com can't fail - look at who is invested and how big is the market.
7. Noone will ever need more than 640K of ram.
8. There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.
etc. Who cares how solid the consensus is - what matters is facts and truth.
Congrats. You poked a hole in the meta-consensus, proving the point.
You ignore the others, that dogma leads to shallow thinking.
All the world is the blend of chaos and order; acceptance and rejection, yin and yang. Your contribution helps drive the analytical consideration of acceptance or rejection.
I accept that dogma can allow wrong thoughts to persist, to drive criticism underground.
I accept that prevailing scientific/expert opinions can also be right.
I accept that the claim of climate change, if true, would have disastrous consequences on a huge number of human lives, and of course business.
I also accept that I'm not seeing people studying this field denying human caused climate change.
I am not seeing countries other that the U.S, where it has become political, denying climate change.
In fact, I see a larger number of nations in the world agree on something than ANYTHING in human history. These countries have their own scientists.
I can certainly entertain that a few countries might make false claims to push other countries to make bad investments. But you're claiming that a global conspiracy on a literally unprecedented scale is happening and that we should ignore a high consequence concept because a relatively small number of people that happen to come from the single country where it is a political issue and to a dizzying degree come from outside the field say everyone else is wrong?
I'm not a climate scientist. I've done a little digging and have my own guess as to what is likely correct, but frankly my opinion of this is low confidence because I'm so ignorant on the topic. When one side says volcanoes are orders of magnitude less greenhouse gas contributers than humanity, and the other side says the reverse, any decision I make is based other than evidence.
Using the same criteria I use to decide what OTHER scientific advice I follow, I conclude that there is a chance that counter positions to climate change are correct...but is more likely that they are wrong.
High chance of occurrence x high consequence if it happens = you need a lot more evidence than I've seen.
If the history books in 500 years talk about how humanity put forth a lot of effort to stop a calamity at a global scale that turned out to be snake oil, that is still a result preferable than about how people followed dogma that lead them to discount repeated evidence and the millions or billions of people suffered for generations. That might sound like a straw man - i could say that failing to rub my head daily would have disastrous consequences - but when paired with the likelihood that someone on the internet saw through this global hoax, it is part of my reasoning.
May I ask your profession and country of residence?
Scientists were widely confident about the correctness of Newton's 2nd law and the universal law of gravitation up till the late 1800s/early 1900s. Then Einstein showed their limitations/incorrectness. You can't look at contemporary modern consensuses because if it's a consensus, it'll look like it's right until the future when/if it's proven wrong.
Philosophy of science says we can't prove theories (of a certain type, which includes most of physics), only disprove them. So there aren't scientific truths, just current best theories.
Many cultures had religious myths about the history of the world which they widely believed.
I'm not saying that people who disagree with the consensus are necessarily right, or even that we should bother to listen to them - just that sometimes they might be so consensus isn't a reason to judge something as true.
> Scientists were widely confident about the correctness of Newton's 2nd law and the universal law of gravitation up till the late 1800s/early 1900s. Then Einstein showed their limitations/incorrectness.
While Einstein revised them, the Newtonian equations are correct enough that they are still generally used for all kinds of things.
If that the best example you can use to make the argument that the current scientific consensus could be wide off the mark, you've done more to refute your argument than advance it.
Bloodletting. It's honestly trivial to find examples of where science was wrong. I'm not going to research them for you if you'll make up ad-hoc reasons to reject them.
Obviously I can't give an example of current consensus being likely wrong because if I knew that, scientists would too and it wouldn't be the consensus.
Here's a snarky example though. See if you can find the flaw in it - current consensus among scientists is that you can't prove causation without doing an experiment - in particular you can't prove it using historical data. This is an obstacle to medical research since ethics impedes controlled experiments on people and it's part of why nutrition advice is frequently wrong (there you go for even more examples). But climate scientists have apparently done just that - themselves demonstrating that either the consensus is wrong or they're wrong. Either way, a consensus is wrong.
These are just an arguments to show how wrong consensus can be though - in reality I'm pretty sure that climate scientists don't acutally believe they're right without any doubt. It will be politics and attempts to manipulate people that changes confidence values into supposed certainty.
Cannot prove causation is not the same as cannot conclude causation. As you point out with your medical example, we have plenty of cases where we act with evidence but not proof. Sometimes these are wrong...but more often they are not (when talking about science).
Often there is some evidence in both directions (for/against a theory), so we likewise have experience and examples where we must decide based on that imperfect info.
Given that we will never be able to prove this causation, at least not in the next few lifetimes and given that, right or wrong, the people (vast majority) in the field are saying the problem is real; Given that inaction is terrible if this is all true, then what evidence would convince you (or any example climate change denier) that the concerns are valid?
How uncertain should man-made global warming sound, in your opinion? You're speaking in gross generalities, perhaps getting some hard numbers. What I've read is that nearly 100% of publishing researchers in the area agree on it (high 90's).
More helpful than the percentage of scientists who think it's true (a bizarre metric in science) would be the confidence they place on that conclusion. It can't be exactly 100%. Showing causation is notoriously hard, especially when you can only look at historical data, and even more so when there's only one example (one case of humans causing global warming).
This figure gets trotted out all the time and it's tiresome because it is so unconvincing to anyone who is even a bit sceptical.
That's a bit like asking what percentage of Christian priests believe God exists. There's kind of a selection bias there.
More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc, which (as I recall, not having the source handy) come up much more conflicted, close to 50% disagreement on various critical questions.
There also the issue of what questions are asked. It's easy to ask, 'is the climate changing', get a near-unanimous response to this near-tautological statement, and declare victory. But that question has nothing to do with any real disagreements real people are having.
The actual questions at hand are much more delicate. First among them is the question of what question we should even be asking.
> More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc,
Wait...while i agree that the methodology that gives 97% suffers a selection bias, I don't agree with the above. I would not trust a survey of priests about the existance of God, but I'd prefer their thoughts on the existance of a particular book of the bible than a survey of choir members.
Science is huge and detailed. I'd not trust geologists over physicists about physics. I acknowledge that physicists are not 100% correct, but that doesn't make non-physicists suddenly more likely to be correct.
I can see your point if the claim is 97% of scientists, but the claim is about climate scientists, because they determine the consensus on the topic.
What method of saying whether or not there is a consensus would you accept that doesn't involve bringing in people with no knowledge or experience with the topic?
You mentioned a 50%ish figure for scientists. Do you have a citation? Even if I think the result unconvincing (based on tjis limited info) I'd like to see their methodology and sample size.
His figure is probably based on a study specifically addressed in link I provided. Look for "Bray and von Storch (2007) and Bray (2010)" and the critique of their results and methodologies.