You use the term "consensus" a lot. Science is not done via "consensus". I don't quite understand your insistence in this regard, but I will respond.
Like playing the old party game "telephone", the use of the term "consensus" in regard to CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming), whatever the source or in whatever context, likely hearkens back to the "97% consensus" report from around 2013 by John Cook. I will comment on that report later, but before that, a little on consensus when it comes to science. At the end of this post you will find a link to an experiment at CERN called CLOUD. This came out of work by Henrik Svensmark. A sentence at the end is of particular interest: "Although they observe that a fraction of cloud nuclei is effectively produced by ionisation due to the interaction of cosmic rays with the constituents of Earth atmosphere, this process is insufficient to attribute all of the present climate modifications to the fluctuations of the cosmic rays intensity modulated by changes in the solar activity and Earth magnetosphere."
Consensus
"It is a strange claim to make [97% concensus]. Consensus or near-consensus is not a scientific argument. Indeed, the heroes in the history of science are those who challenged the prevailing consensus and convincingly demonstrated that everyone thought wrong. Such heroes are even better appreciated if they take on not only the scientific establishment but the worldly and godly authorities as well."
"Well known examples of this include the challenges to the theory that Earth was the center of the universe, that infection was spread by surgeons who didn’t wash their hands, that the Earth’s crust had plates that moved, and that gastric ulcers were caused by a bacterial infection, and not stress as physicians once widely believed. As William Briggs writes:"
"There was once a consensus among astronomers that the heavens were static, that the boundaries of the universe constant. But in 1929, Hubble observed his red shift among the stars, overturning that consensus. In 1904, there was a consensus among physicists that Newtonian mechanics was, at last, the final word in explaining the workings of the [universe]. All that was left to do was to mop up the details. But in 1905, Einstein and a few others soon convinced them that this view was false.'
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
"That is from Charles Mackay in his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds first published in 1841."
"I think it is an apt description of the process that led to Cook et al. (2013) [the 97% concensus paper] Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature because that paper is in fact, a product of a crowd evaluating a crowd."
"Consensus can also cause disaster, as NASA proved with a consensus of management that solid rocket booster O-rings affected by unusual cold weren’t worth worrying about or that a foam strike during launch wouldn’t damage the wing of the space shuttle and were “not even worth mentioning”.
"Clearly, the power of thousands in agreement on scientific consensus can’t stand up to stubborn facts and that is the self-correcting process of science which sometimes works slowly, other times dramatically quickly. Given that consensus by itself means nothing in the face of such facts, it seems to me that consensus is just another manifestation of herd-like thinking as illustrated by Mackay."
Now for the 97% concensus:
"97 Articles Refuting The '97% Consensus' on global warming"
"The 97% “consensus” study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it, “The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.”
" – Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)"
There are 96 other articles about the 97% concensus paper, but the one below tells the tale pretty well:
"Cooks '97% consensus' disproven by a new peer reviewed paper showing major math errors"
12 years ago
Anthony Watts
"UPDATE: While this paper (a rebuttal) has been accepted, another paper by Cook and Nuccitelli has been flat out rejected by the journal Earth System Dynamics. See update below. – Anthony"
“0.3% climate consensus, not 97.1%”
"PRESS RELEASE – September 3rd, 2013"
"A major peer-reviewed paper by four senior researchers has exposed grave errors in an earlier paper in a new and unknown journal that had claimed a 97.1% scientific consensus that Man had caused at least half the 0.7 Cº global warming since 1950.
A tweet in President Obama’s name had assumed that the earlier, flawed paper, by John Cook and others, showed 97% endorsement of the notion that climate change is dangerous:
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” [Emphasis added][by Watts]
The new paper by the leading climatologist Dr David Legates and his colleagues, published in the respected Science and Education journal, now in its 21st year of publication, reveals that Cook had not considered whether scientists and their published papers had said climate change was “dangerous”.
The consensus Cook considered was the standard definition: that Man had caused most post-1950 warming. Even on this weaker definition the true consensus among published scientific papers is now demonstrated to be not 97.1%, as Cook had claimed, but only 0.3%.
Only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate papers Cook examined explicitly stated that Man caused most of the warming since 1950. Cook himself had flagged just 64 papers as explicitly supporting that consensus, but 23 of the 64 had not in fact supported it.
This shock result comes scant weeks before the United Nations’ climate panel, the IPCC, issues its fifth five-yearly climate assessment, claiming “95% confidence” in the imagined – and, as the new paper shows, imaginary – consensus.
Climate Consensus and ‘Misinformation’: a Rejoinder to ‘Agnotology, Scientific Consensus, and the Teaching and Learning of Climate Change’ decisively rejects suggestions by Cook and others that those who say few scientists explicitly support the supposedly near-unanimous climate consensus are misinforming and misleading the public.
Dr Legates said: “It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%.
“It is still more astonishing that the IPCC should claim 95% certainty about the climate consensus when so small a fraction of published papers explicitly endorse the consensus as the IPCC defines it.”
Dr Willie Soon, a distinguished solar physicist, quoted the late scientist-author Michael Crichton, who had said: “If it’s science, it isn’t consensus; if it’s consensus, it isn’t science.” He added: “There has been no global warming for almost 17 years. None of the ‘consensus’ computer models predicted that.”
Dr William Briggs, “Statistician to the Stars”, said: “In any survey such as Cook’s, it is essential to define the survey question very clearly. Yet Cook used three distinct definitions of climate consensus interchangeably. Also, he arbitrarily excluded about 8000 of the 12,000 papers in his sample on the unacceptable ground that they had expressed no opinion on the climate consensus. These artifices let him reach the unjustifiable conclusion that there was a 97.1% consensus when there was not.
“In fact, Cook’s paper provides the clearest available statistical evidence that there is scarcely any explicit support among scientists for the consensus that the IPCC, politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the media have so long and so falsely proclaimed. That was not the outcome Cook had hoped for, and it was not the outcome he had stated in his paper, but it was the outcome he had really found.”
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s imminent Fifth Assessment Report, who found the errors in Cook’s data, said: “It may be that more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950. But only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly. Cook had not considered how many papers merely implied that. No doubt many scientists consider it possible, as we do, that Man caused some warming, but not most warming.
“It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.”"
[End of Watts press release]
Here is another of the 97 papers:
"A psychologist's scathing review of John Cook's '97% consensus' nonsensus paper"
11 years ago
Anthony Watts
"Psychologist José Duarte writes: The Cook et al. (2013) 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change."
'Let’s go ahead and walk through that sentence again. The Cook et al 97% paper included a bunch of psychology studies, marketing papers, and surveys of the general public as scientific endorsement of anthropogenic climate change. I only spent ten minutes with their database — there will be more such papers for those who search. I’m not willing to spend a lot of time with their data, for reasons I detail further down."
"This paper is vacated, as a scientific product, given that it included psychology papers, and also given that it twice lied about its method (claiming not to count social science papers, and claiming to use independent raters), and the professed cheating by the raters. It was essentially voided by its invalid method of using partisan and unqualified political activists to subjectively rate climate science abstracts on the issue on which their activism centers — a stunning and unprecedented method. I’m awaiting word on retraction from the journal, but I think we already know that this paper is vacated. It doesn’t represent knowledge of the consensus."
"I want to note here that the authors are still misrepresenting their 97% figure as consisting of “climate papers”. For an upcoming event, Cook claims “They found that among relevant climate papers, 97% endorsed the consensus that humans were causing global warming.” Clearly, this is false. There is no way we’ll be able to call the above papers “relevant climate papers”. Don’t let these people get away with such behavior — call them out on it. Ask them how psychology papers can be “relevant climate papers”, raise your hand at events, notify journalists, etc. Make them defend, explicitly, what they did. Hopefully, it will be retracted soon. But until then, make them defend what they did. For one thing, Cook should now have to disclose how many psychology and other irrelevant papers were included. In a scenario where retraction wasn’t justified, they would have to rewrite the paper. In this case, the false statements, fraud, and absurd method mandate retraction, and some sort of penance."
This article sums the 97 articles up pretty well:
May 01, 2015 | APPEARED IN THE FINANCIAL POST
"Putting the 'con' in consensus; Not only is there no 97 per cent consensus among climate scientists, many misunderstand core issues"
By: Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics, University of Guelph
The most highly cited paper supposedly found 97 per cent of published scientific studies support man-made global warming. But in addition to poor survey methodology, that tabulation is often misrepresented. Most papers (66 per cent) actually took no position. Of the remaining 34 per cent, 33 per cent supported at least a weak human contribution to global warming. So divide 33 by 34 and you get 97 per cent, but this is unremarkable since the 33 per cent includes many papers that critique key elements of the IPCC position.
Two recent surveys shed more light on what atmospheric scientists actually think. Bear in mind that on a topic as complex as climate change, a survey is hardly a reliable guide to scientific truth, but if you want to know how many people agree with your view, a survey is the only way to find out.
In 2012 the American Meteorological Society (AMS) surveyed its 7,000 members, receiving 1,862 responses. Of those, only 52% said they think global warming over the 20th century has happened and is mostly man-made (the IPCC position). The remaining 48% either think it happened but natural causes explain at least half of it, or it didn’t happen, or they don’t know. Furthermore, 53% agree that there is conflict among AMS members on the question.
So no sign of a 97% consensus. Not only do about half reject the IPCC conclusion, more than half acknowledge that their profession is split on the issue.
The Netherlands Environmental Agency recently published a survey of international climate experts. 6550 questionnaires were sent out, and 1868 responses were received, a similar sample and response rate to the AMS survey. In this case the questions referred only to the post-1950 period. 66% agreed with the IPCC that global warming has happened and humans are mostly responsible. The rest either don’t know or think human influence was not dominant. So again, no 97% consensus behind the IPCC.
But the Dutch survey is even more interesting because of the questions it raises about the level of knowledge of the respondents. Although all were described as “climate experts,” a large fraction only work in connected fields such as policy analysis, health and engineering, and may not follow the primary physical science literature.
Regarding the recent slowdown in warming, here is what the IPCC said: “The observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years.” Yet 46 per cent of the Dutch survey respondents - nearly half - believe the warming trend has stayed the same or increased. And only 25 per cent agreed that global warming has been less than projected over the past 15 to 20 years, even though the IPCC reported that 111 out of 114 model projections overestimated warming since 1998.
Three quarters of respondents disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement “Climate is chaotic and cannot be predicted.” Here is what the IPCC said in its 2003 report: “In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Looking into further detail there are other interesting ways in which the socalled experts are unaware of unresolved discrepancies between models and observations regarding issues like warming in the tropical troposphere and overall climate sensitivity.
What can we take away from all this? First, lots of people get called “climate experts” and contribute to the appearance of consensus, without necessarily being knowledgeable about core issues. A consensus among the misinformed is not worth much.
Second, it is obvious that the “97%” mantra is untrue. The underlying issues are so complex it is ludicrous to expect unanimity. The near 50/50 split among AMS members on the role of greenhouse gases is a much more accurate picture of the situation. The phoney claim of 97% consensus is mere political rhetoric aimed at stifling debate and intimidating people into silence.
Link to CLOUD experiment at CERN (home of the Large Hadron Collider)
To understand the importance of this experiment, one must realize the lack of ability by current climate modeling to account for cloud cover in climate change or predict how many clouds there are or will be. Also, real world temperature data do not support their predictions. Try and get raw data if you don't believe me. They don't sarcastically call our current age "Adjustocene" for no reason. Warmists are constantly fiddling with (adjusting) real world data to get it to fit their models
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_experimentRemember, I'm not trying to prove or disprove CAGW. I am only saying it is not only religious people questioning it or even mainly religious people. Many serious scientists do and the notion that an overwhelming consensus of them believe in CAGW doesn't withstand scrutiny.