Originally posted by gunnut
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Consensus is when scientists in a particular field, be it physics, medicine or climate change, gather through conferences, peer review, publications among other avenues compare and discuss their findings. Through this they may discover that they see a consensus in some areas and not in others. Communicating that consensus to those outside the scientific community is the impossible part as evidence by you as you are outside. Those outside like for things to be in nice tidy black and white packages which, unfortunately, is impossible. Being an insider I have no issue with this.
Now I will further complicate things for you. There is a new word in use today in the community called paradigm shift. Personally I can't stand the word and never use it myself. This is the view that consensus and thoughts about a theory are interconnected by researchers in a field. When enough anomalies in the science presented themselves then the science would go into a crisis mode at which point a new theory would emerge and a new paradigm would replace the old. There is a paradigm shift right now in the thinking of climate and man. There are those who say it is all natural and those who say it is man influenced. This is the crisis mode and in the end I think there will be a almost total, except for a few non-believers, shift to man having a strong influence on climate.
As to facts I will use this analogy to describe you. In the movie "Jaws" Mayor Vaughn does not want to close down the beaches at the request of Brody. He worries about the loss of money. Hooper tells him there is a giant shark out there and he even found one of it's teeth imbedded in a boat. Mayor Vaughn asks for the tooth as proof and Hooper says he dropped it. Well with no proof, despite all else, Mayor Vaughn basically says there can't be a big shark and the beaches stay open.
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