The Knight Life by Keith Knight for December 06, 2012

99.9%? Did he pull that number out of Chris Matthews; @$$?

So that is what THAT thing is on rump’s head. It needs…something, maybe freedom or to be put out of its misery.

Nope, right the first time. And besides, science is science; consensus has no place in it. When the facts don’t fit the theory, consensus goes out the window. Unless, of course, it’s leftist “science”; then science goes out the window and we are commanded to worship at the altar of “consensus.”

Again, Keith please skip the political commentary, you’re just not good at it. Stick to the funny stuff.

But…I like phantom menace (Insert confession bear face here)

To the people saying “consensus has no place in science” — Crichton was completely wrong about that. Science has plenty of consensus: that the germ theory of disease works, that Einstein’s theory of relativity is so far a good description of the universe, but Newtonian mechanics work fine for launching rockets, that HIV causes AIDS and that the heliocentric view of the solar system is correct and the geocentric view isn’t. Consensus is only brought into discussion, however, and becomes an “issue”, where the topic under consideration is one in which there is a vocal anti-science group making it into a subject of debate amongst the non-scientific public: issues where scientists end up having to emphasize that there IS a scientific conclusion, in fact – that evolution exists, that vaccines do not cause autism, that climate change is real and humans are causing most of it.

Of course there is still scientific discussion and controversy: are there other selecting forces which can predominate over natural selection as a driver of evolution in the wild? What role does lateral gene transfer play in evolution? How does evolvability itself evolve? What ARE the real causes of autism? How early can autism be reliably detected? Can any environmental factors contribute, and if so, how? What are the main feedbacks in climate change? What are the largest effects that we expect to see, how large will they be, how best can we predict them? What are the best methods to address the problems we see coming? All of these are real questions; none of them invalidate the consensus conclusions. To the contrary, they are based on the consensus conclusions, as science moved on from the basic questions of “whether” and started addressing the more interesting and detailed questions of “what else”, “where” and “how much”.

So, is there a consensus in science that climate change is real, and that humans are a major driving force?

Yes.