A Quote by Alan Stern
Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.
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The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.
The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
I'm not a specialist in the science but I have followed it fairly closely and it seems to me that there is among the experts a clear consensus that potential climate change is something to worry about.
Politicians and some of the scientists like to say that there's a consensus now on global warming or the science has been settled, but you have to ask them, what is there a consensus on? Because it really makes a difference. What are you talking about? The only consensus I`m aware of is that it's warmed in the last century. They completely ignore the fact that there's this thing called the Oregon petition that was signed by 19,000 professionals and scientists who don't agree with the idea that we are causing climate change.
Science is science. Science is what is. After discovery, tests, trial, if a consensus of scientists today said that the sun orbits around the earth, would we say that they're right simply because there is a consensus? No. Because we know the earth orbits around the sun just as if there were a consensus that the earth is flat would we agree with them? No. So there can't be a consensus on something that hasn't been proven. This is a political movement. This whole global warming thing is a political movement.
Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that all the lessons are true... Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
There is no science in global warming. "Mr. Limbaugh, that's typical of what you! That's the most outrageous statement I've ever heard anybody ever make! No science in global warming?" Do you know how I know there's no science in global warming, folks? Because they tell us a "consensus of scientists" agrees that X. There is no consensus in science.
Science is not about consensus, and consensus is not science.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
The manufactured consensus of the IPCC has had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public's trust in the IPCC.
People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.
I've been checking with people back in South Florida to see if Hurricane Dennis is going to whack my house, and the consensus of the experts seems to be: No, it will not, unless it does, in which case, yes. So I'm feeling really calm over here in London.
Reaching consensus in a group is often confused with finding the right answer.
I have this idea of a Taiwan Consensus, which means people in Taiwan have to get together and form a consensus of their own and that they turn around to talk to the Chinese to form a cross-strait consensus so we can build a relationship on that consensus. And in my view, that is the right order to do things.
I don't know if there is really an objective truth about either. I liken this to what Buddhism says about the individual, that change starts with the individual. I think it is really about purifying your own actions, and I have seen that in my own life.
Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.
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