Is There Consensus?

Part 2 of a series of 5 for NextGen Journal















Thirteen national academies of science

Royal Society (UK)

American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Chemical Society

American Physical Society

American Geophysical Union



But how much are you willing to risk on that chance?


10 thoughts on “Is There Consensus?

  1. Your fine summary concerns the capabilities of the science community to discover physical reality. If I may offer a preface:

    We may note the word consensus implies a voting or election – but this issue is not applied research – this is a discovery of a palpable reality which most all scientists have discovered it to be true.

    Take flat earth- believing the earth to be flat, did not make it flat. Humans did not invent the globe shape and reshape a flat earth. It was something discovered, not invented.

    Scientific consensus on CO2 warming just measures the capabilities of the scientists to discover AGW.

    Thanks for this wonderful summary of the science

  2. Guy Callender was pretty much a lone voice. Consensus was that man could never put in enough CO2 to adversely affect the climate. Eventually a few then many others came to accept the proposition than man could affect the climate. Now the consensus is; that we are already affecting the climate.

    While there is consensus that we are affecting the climate there is still argument on how much we are affecting climate, for how long and how fast future changes will occur.

    Human caused warming is not just the consensus position, but the consensus that has had to fight its way through, If you will a consensus that has been well tested and argued, not a consensus through being the resident argument.

    Good point. I am currently reading “The Warming Papers”, edited by David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert, which reprints and discusses some of the relevant papers (including Callendar’s). I highly recommend it. -Kate

  3. I second Tony O’Brien’s point


    This illustrates the very important distinction between what a scientific consensus actually is and how the denialist crowd misrepresents it

  4. Tony O’Brien, one point to consider also is that back then, the number of people that had been actively studying the greenhouse effect was very small — I would guess countable on one hand. Is the notion of ‘consensus’ even meaningful then?

    I seem to remember that the reason ‘saturation’ fell down was, that the propagation of thermal IR in the atmosphere became interesting for remote sensing (also military) and missile guidance. It had to be understood correctly.

    Yes, a great deal of our knowledge of atmospheric science stemmed from the Cold War. Spencer Weart gives a great account of this in The Discovery of Global Warming. -Kate

  5. Perhaps some people (who aren’t liars) have this weird notion that the “consensus” was attained by having the scientists meet secretly in a smoke-filled room, or something close.

    Indeed, Lindzen, a denialist sort of climate scientist, had been promoting something similar to this idea, namely that the “consensus” was formed by some sort of secret campaign of corruption.

    I guess the actual process by which the “consensus” was achieved sounded a bit too mundane for some.

    — frank


    That’s a subtle but very well made point!

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