[glenra]

An article with that title should have mentioned the possibility of an error cascade. Occasionally - not often, but sometimes - the "consensus scientific view" on a subject happens to be wrong. Wrong views can persist for quite a while, and are more likely to do so when the subject is politically charged. Preference falsification even among scientists can lead them to a false belief regarding what their peers believe.

Here's a good discussion of error cascades in the context of climate change: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642

On the use of terms like 'deniers':

> "Sound theory doesn’t have to be buttressed by demonizing its opponents; it demonstrates itself with predictive success."

[stirbot]

I don't believe error cascade is happening in the field of climate science. A multitude of accepted methodologies using scores of independent datasets from various fields overwhelmingly produce results consistent with anthropogenic global warming.

Additionally there are well funded groups who would love nothing more than to uncover such an error cascade. Yet even a study funded by the same people who run the Heartland Institute produced results consistent with AGW. Visit a website like WattsUpWithThat to witness intelligent people trying their very best to twist data or methods to fit their worldview. If something like this is there to be found, it would have been found by now. The first order science is truly simple. All that is being debated now is when and how severe the effect will be. Sadly by the time we can scientifically confirm the 'Welcome to AGW' sign, we may be 30 years inside the border.

Using the term denier does make convincing those people more difficult. Politically, however, it may be useful to label this small but vocal group as misinformed and stubborn, and get on with transitioning to a sustainable and stable future.

[glenra]

> A multitude of accepted methodologies using scores of independent datasets from various fields overwhelmingly produce results consistent with anthropogenic global warming.

Of course they do. That doesn't mean there's no error cascade surrounding our understanding of what this means.

That past human activity has produced some amount of warming is a pretty uninteresting factoid. In fact, it's trivially true in that land-use patterns alone can have a measurable impact on temperature - you don't even need a theory relating to CO2 to establish that there has been some "anthropogenic global warming" (still less to find that data is merely "not inconsistent with" this notion).

But when alarmists raise alarm, they have something very different in mind. They believe that the warming rate and/or level is unprecedented in human history, that warming has been a bad thing and is likely to produce net negative impacts in the near term. They tend to think it is sensible to talk about "climate sensitivity" having a single value and that this value is high - at least 3 degrees per doubling. All of those are debatable points, and it's wrong to assume scientists agree on them based on their agreement with a much more vaguely defined "consensus view" that humans have caused some undefined amount of warming.

> If something like this is there to be found, it would have been found by now.

Several such things have been found. The post I linked to mentioned a few. The ongoing efforts to hide or minimize the MWP (and thereby show recent temperatures to be "unprecedented") is the usual example, perhaps best documented on ClimateAudit.org .