Reader’s letter: Gambling on consensus

It has, reasonably, been said that “climate is what you expect, weather is what you actually get” but the problem is that, although we are good now at measuring weather, we humans are terrible at remembering historic weather, even extreme weather, in the past.

Older people in this country can remember cold winters and the way in which our winters have become warmer, but feel that our summers have not changed very much.

They can do this without the assistance of the new ‘statistical’ evidence.

A narrative has grown about the possible causes of these changes which began to be called ‘global warming’ but then that perceived warming was less apparent.

The slogan then became known as ‘climate change’ and climate was redefined as the weather over the last 30 years, which must therefore, inevitably, change over quite short periods of time.

The new term used is ‘climate crisis’. The ‘science’ about the cause of changes in climate is said to be ‘settled’ and our future is dire.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.

‘Consensus’ is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody would say that the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away.

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. The notion of a monolithic “science,” defined only as what scientists tell us, is pernicious.

The idea of “scientific consensus” is actively dangerous. The journey to true knowledge can take place by transparency in disagreement and openness in debate.

Gambling huge sums of money to cure the ‘problem’ of the perceived effect of fossil fuels on a ‘global’ climate is just that — a gamble based on very poor odds! — ROBERT SHEPPARD, Beckingham.