Friday, December 11, 2009

What does the word 'consensus' mean?

The recent theft of email from East Anglia climate research "scientists" was a crime. The perpetrators should be caught and appropriately punished for wrong-doing.

The content of those messages, however, has cast serious doubt about the integrity of their research and their theories about global warming. Yes, we said it: Everything they have put forward to date is still just a theory.

Al Gore, Supreme Leader of the Church of Climate Change, and his unquestioning disciples continue to drone on about "consensus" in the scientific community regarding their theories of human-caused temperature change. Gore and his sycophants say there is "consensus" around the idea that human beings are making the earth warmer, and that we can do something to stop that from happening.

We decided to look up the dictionary definition of "consensus," and discovered this is just one more English word some liberals would like to re-shape to fit their own view. Not so fast. Here's what Webster's says:

1 a : general agreement : unanimity b : the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned
2 : group solidarity in sentiment and belief

Argue all you want to about the theory. But call it a theory until it's been proven. And don't try to re-write the dictionary by using a word that means unanimity to describe your beliefs and ours.

Do you think such a "consensus" exists? Perhaps more importantly, what do you think about people trying to twist the meaning of plain English words?

2 comments:

  1. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

    "Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history . . .When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, and award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.

    “The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds. . . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” – Indian Geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

    “Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense…The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” - Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal

    “Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy

    “Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp. . . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

    “I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” - Dr. Gn LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s CSIRO.

    “I am a skeptic. . . Global Warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

    “After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

    “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way around. . . A large number of critical documents at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact.” Andrei Kapista, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

    “I am convinced that current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken . . . Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science.” – Award Winning Physicist Dr. Will Happer, Professor at the Department of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy, who has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences.

    “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

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  2. Winghunter, thank you for posting all these interesting quotes. Very insightful thoughts from scientists who might not agree there is "consensus."

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