The consensus is around Money not Science

There is always a consensus in science right before some maverick comes along and proves everyone wrong.  Science is about upending long held beliefs with better data and better analysis.  Consensus is not science it is politics, which is why we should always be wary of statements like 97% of scientists agree.  In politics the majority rules; in science the truth rules and it only takes one person with the truth.

To a real scientist consensus is meaningless but to a politician scientific consensus is very useful as propaganda and incredibly easy to produce.  You do not actually need all scientists to agree; you just need to silence and misrepresent the ones who don’t.  This is exactly the case with the consensus on climate change.

Everyone has heard the fantastic claim that 97% of scientists agree that CO2 is causing dangerous climate change.  This claim came from a paper written years ago.  The authors of this paper reviewed thousands of other scientific papers and classified them as either supporting or denying climate change.  They claimed that 97% of the papers supported the global warming narrative.  Like everything else from the climate cult this is a lie.

What the authors did was count any paper that dealt with any aspect of climate change as affirmation of the theory.  This was not true.  In fact 99.7% of the papers never said anything about the cause of the climate change.  They only studied the effects of climate change.

They reviewed the actual papers used by Cook and found that only 0.3% of the 11,944 abstracts and 1.6% of the smaller sample that excluded those papers expressing no opinion endorsed man-made global warming as they defined it.

It is true that thousands of scientists study the effects of climate change.  Scientists study climate change for the same reason people rob banks; because that is where the money is.  Research scientists usually don’t produce a product that can be sold.  Their income comes from research grants and most of those come from governments.  So researches are force to go hat in hand to the government asking for money.  These people are not stupid.  They know the odds of receiving funding go up dramatically if they can link their research to climate change.

This is how the funding game works.  Say your objective is to study butterfly reproduction.  Your odds of getting funding will depend on how you word your proposal.  There is a matrix that must be considered.

Proposal wording	Chance of funding
Study butterfly reproduction	Less than 10% of getting any funding.
Study the effects of climate change on butterfly reproduction	100% chance of getting some funding with a 50% of getting what you ask for.
Study whether climate change could lead to butterfly extinction	100% chance of getting some funding with more than 90% chance of getting everything you ask for
Study how the potential collapse of butterfly populations due to climate change could change entire eco systems	100% chance of getting what you ask for with at least a 50% chance of getting much more than you ask for.
Study how collapsing butterfly populations and changing ecosystems due to climate change can lead to extinction of all life on earth.	You will get funding for multiple years and at least one major network will put you on retainer as their climate change expert.

 

In the end you are just studying butterfly reproduction but how much money you get depends on how much of your soul you are willing to sell.  The scientific consensus around climate change is just an agreement among scientists that getting research funding is better than not getting research funding.  Anyone who does not want to play this game will toll away in obscurity and poverty, unless they make the mistake of pointing out CO2 is not a problem.