17 Jun 2006 Galileo’s Interrogators had a Consensus

Another noteworthy global warming article appears in Canada’s National Post.

By Terence Corcoran, this one says, in part:

It is now firmly established, repeated ad nauseam in the media and elsewhere, that the debate over global warming has been settled by scientific consensus. The subject is closed…

Back when modern science was born, the battle between consensus and new science worked the other way around. More often than not, the consensus of the time — dictated by religion, prejudice, mysticism and wild speculation, false premises — was wrong. The role of science, from Galileo to Newton and through the centuries, has been to debunk the consensus and move us forward. But now science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats.

As a mass phenomenon, repeated appeals to consensus to support a scientific claim are relatively new. But it is not new to science. For more than a century, various philosophical troublemakers have been trying to undermine science and the scientific method. These range from Marxists who saw science as a product of class warfare and historical materialism — Newton was a lackey of the ruling classes and pawn of history — to scores of sociological theorists and philosophers who spent much of the 20th century attempting to subvert the first principles of modern, Enlightenment science…

Global warming science by consensus, with appeals to United Nations panels and other agencies as authorities, is the apotheosis of the century-long crusade to overthrow the foundations of modern science and replace them with collectivist social theories of science…

In short, under the new authoritarian science based on consensus, science doesn’t matter much any more. If one scientist’s 1,000-year chart showing rising global temperatures is based on bad data, it doesn’t matter because we still otherwise have a consensus. If a polar bear expert says polar bears appear to be thriving, thus disproving a popular climate theory, the expert and his numbers are dismissed as being outside the consensus. If studies show solar fluctuations rather than carbon emissions may be causing climate change, these are damned as relics of the old scientific method. If ice caps are not all melting, with some even getting larger, the evidence is ridiculed and condemned. We have a consensus, and this contradictory science is just noise from the skeptical fringe…

Please read the whole thing.