Scientists Hide Behind Dubious Global Warming “Consensus”

Climate scare-mongers love to hide behind the alleged scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are an imminent threat to the planet.  But to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the number of scientists who believe a theory is irrelevant to its truth.  In fact, scientific consensuses have a long history of coming to ignoble ends, as I discuss in my column for the Washington Examiner today:

Once it was the unshakable belief of experts that the Sun revolved around the Earth.

This Ptolemaic model of the solar system, so-called after the 2nd century A.D. Roman astronomer who cemented the hypothesis in the Western mind, was for centuries considered so obvious and uncontroversial that to even suggest otherwise was to be accused of insanity, stupidity or heresy.

One might say there was a scientific “consensus” that the Sun orbited the Earth. But guess what – all those elite thinkers were wrong. Embarrassingly, irretrievably wrong. It took Galileo Galilei’s newly invented telescope in the early 17th century to shake the foundations of the geocentric model in the public mind, and even then the Italian astronomer was hauled before the Inquisition for his troubles.

The lesson is simple: Just because experts say it’s so, don’t necessarily mean it’s so. They are subject to prejudices of heart and errors of logic like every other human being.

We should keep that in mind when considering the contemporary scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are causing the Earth to warm, the “anthropogenic global warming” theory (AGW).

Scientific consensuses can be wrong for a very simple reason – scientists can be as prone to self -delusion or self-serving deception as anyone else, as demonstrated by the sickening “climategate” scandals in which major climate scientists are revealed to be covering their own behinds and protecting their own jobs at the expense of honest scientific debate.

But as Galileo could tell you, that sort of thing’s been going on for a long, long time.