Concensus? Well, no.

We keep hearing that there is a concensus among climate scientists -- along the lines of 97 percent or 98 percent -- that mankind is driving catastrophic global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. The primary source of this "97 percent concensus" argument apparently is based on a graduate thesis that was somewhat less than rigorous. Recently, a study of the studies claiming concensus found that those studies dramatically overstate the number of climate scientists that view mankinds contribution to the greenhouse effect as a problem:

The main pillar of the warmist argument is the contention that a "consensus" exists among scientists that global warming is caused by man and threatens catastrophe. But a Canada-based group calling itself Friends of Science has just completed a review of the four main studies used to document the alleged consensus and found that only 1 - 3% of respondents "explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming," and that there was "no agreement with a catastrophic view."

Just for starters, science is not about concensus. It is about putting forth a theory or hypothesis and then trying to disprove it. Failure to disprove the hypothesis tends to support it. Climate alarmists have never done that. Their models are terrible, but every claim they make is based on climate models, not actual data. So they claim concensus. Just like their models, the claim is wrong and repeatedly based on horseshit studies.

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.
One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.
Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

Please not that the Oreske paper was an opinion essay, not a peer-reviewed paper. There's some rigorous research. She failed even to make clear what her claimed concensus was agreeing on. And the survey that gave us the 97 percent number? Ouch.

The “97 percent” figure in the Zimmerman/Doran survey represents the views of only 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. Seventy-nine scientists—of the 3,146 who responded to the survey—does not a consensus make.

If you are trying to sell me a scientific conclusion, sell me on the science, not on the conclusion. The vast majority of people who "believe" in global warming don't understand the theory. They can't explain it, which makes discussions with them on this pointless. Believe me, I know. Disagree? I defy a global warming believer to explain the actual theory to me in the comments. Trust me, I will be abso-fucking-lutely brutal when you get it wrong. Which you will.

If the science were so settled -- please name another field of scientific research where that expression is used -- why would climate alarmists feel the need to get medieval on everyone who disagrees with them?

News that Lennart Bengtsson, the respected former director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), sent shockwaves through the climate research community. GWPF is most notable for its skepticism about climate change and its efforts to undermine the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The tremors his decision sent through the scientific community shocked Bengtsson.
The scientist said colleagues placed so much pressure on him after joining GWPF that he withdrew from the group out of fear for his own health. Bengtsson added that his treatment had been reminiscent of the persecution of suspected Communists in the United States during the era of McCarthyism in the 1950s.

So, Der Spiegel, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, is running this article. AGW skeptics -- that's anthropogenic global warming, for those believers out there who don't even speak the lingo -- actually get quoted here without being called "deniers," a term normally used to describe the nutbags and Islamist killers who insist the Holocaust never happened. Apparently, even suggesting that the AGW theory might not be right is too much for the alarmists to accept. But the debate is finally getting noticed:

Climate researchers are now engaged in a debate about whether their science is being crippled by a compulsion to conform. They wonder if pressure to reach a consensus is too great. They ask if criticism is being suppressed. No less is at stake than the credibility of research evidence for climate change and the very question of whether climate research is still reliable.
Bengtsson said in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE that he wanted to open up the climate change debate by joining GWPF. He said that in view of large gaps in knowledge, the pressure to reach a consensus in climate research "does not make sense".

What, exactly, is the argument against a healthy scientific debate? I can think of a number of excellent reasons to dismiss the alarmists -- their models fail to predict the past, none of their models agree with each other and all of them have failed to predict the future based on their performance since 1988. Why listen to someone who is always wrong and whose main argument seems to be that they know lots of guys who agree with them, evidence be damned? The global mean temperature, to the extent that means anything, has been flat since 1998. No warming. What are you worried about? Maybe if the alarmists didn't claim that AGW causes pretty much everything  -- and I do mean EVERYTHING -- they would have more credibility. As it is, fuck 'em.