Science by consensus

We now have science by "consensus". No longer is it required for scientists to produce actual evidence to support scientific conclusions, it can now be created by "consensus"; and a ‘consensus’ is whatever the news media and Al Gore says it is. Currently, consensus science has concluded man is responsible for global warming.

In 2002 a Nobel Prize was given to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky for their work on "availability bias", which is the tendency to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it is accepted. Today the term is replaced by author Noel Sheppard with the phrase "informational cascade" as the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the news media repeating it and causing people to replace an individual’s beliefs with the crowd's beliefs.

Al Gore and other global warming alarmists use ‘informational cascade’ by resorting to arguments such as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona." There is nothing rational in this argument, and no scientific evidence is provided, but it sounds good and gives those that are predisposed to believe in the premise an opportunity to rationalize their irrational conviction.

Public officials and the leftist news media are eager to support the premise because the idea has become accepted by the public because the news media accepts it. If this seems circuitous, it is. Those accepting the idea that man causes global warming do so because it is a consensus and that is proof enough for them.

Nobel Prize winner Al Gore who, unlike the internet, actually started the belief that man causes global warming stands to profit handsomely by the crescendo he has initiated. Gore is now a part of the venture capitalist firm ‘Vinod Khosla’ that invests in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thereby ‘reduce global warming’ and ‘save the planet’ as it is doing so. If there is a government mandate, or in indeed a worldwide mandate, for example, to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative, this would represent a $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. It doesn’t matter to investors that the impact on global warming would be nil.

Why should Gore run for president, he would be taking a pay cut.

When all is said and done, the so-called consensus is just a media concocted illusion that carbon dioxide is causing the planet to warm beyond what has occurred historically.

Will this ‘inconvenient truth’ be realized by the public before the United States gives in to domestic and international socialist pressures to implement draconian measures whose only result will be our financial ruin – only time will tell, and it doesn’t look good so far.