About That “Scientific Consensus” Thingy…

There are many, many examples of “scientific consensus” being flat out wrong, from the scholastics who derided Galileo and compelled the Catholic church to place him in house arrest (as much to protect him from the Academia Nut Fruitcakes of the 17th Century as anything else… plus ça change and all that, I suppose… ) to the much trumpeted “consensus” about Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today. Here’s Jacob Bronowski mentioning yet another “scientific consensus” in a snippet from his 1973 presentation, “The Ascent of Man”–

Of course, Bronowski was exaggerating a wee tad. After all, J.J. Thomson was working diligently at that time to prove the existence and properties of electrons, which he called “corpuscles”, and others were exploring and debating the existence and properties of atoms, but in general what Bronowski asserts is as true of the “scientific community” of the very early 1900s in regards to consensus on the existence of the atom as “scientific consensus” today regarding Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today: the accepted dogma of those with the power of position, money and the public’s ear is just as anti-scientific today as the assertions from ignorance of the anti-atomic dogmatists of the early 1900s. And the real scientists are working today, just as out of the limelight as Thomson and his colleagues were in 1900.

But, of course, then Thomson was awarded a Nobel for his work in 1907 and the tide began to turn…

“Scientific consensus” has as often been wrong as right over the centuries, and we’d do well to learn the lesson that theory must bend to fact, and not the other way around as those who embrace the Cult of Anthropogenic Whatever-They’re-Calling-It-Today would have it with their always wrong (at least so far) computer models that “prove”–with faked data as often as not, it seems–the sky is falling (though no one has been hit by a chunk of sky yet, despite their predictions).