"The war on terror wasn't worked out by scientists, but by frightening politicians."
I think if you look back and reconstruct the timeline, you will see that the 'consensus' on global warming was worked out by frightening politicians, not scientists. The political activity on climate change goes back to the eighties, in Germany and the UK (Nigel Lawson recalls Margaret Thatcher saying that there was big money on the table for any scientist that could demonstrate the link). Thatcher's speech 'New threats for old' which signalled the UK govt's commitment to climate change was crystal clear in its intent: once the Cold War threat was no longer effective as an organising principle for the world pecking order, elites would need a greater danger to scare lesser states into line (the speech was written by diplomat Sir Crispin Tickell, advisor to all three of Thatcher's successors).
Diplomacy drove the 'consensus' much more than nature did. The Rio Summit was 1992. Consider this: how many scientific theses are validated by a *United Nations* panel? Indeed the perception that climate change might be used as a basis for imposing first world discipline on the third world precedes any science on global warming. It was first set out by Sir Crispin in his book Climatic Change and World Affairs in 1978, when there was no theory of global warming, only of 'pollution' (the book was co-written with Solly Zuckerman, who helped organise a private army in preparation for a coup against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson). The theory of global warming was only coined after this former Cold Stream Guard developed the argument that environmental dangers justified dictatorial methods.
Doug writes:
"Look, there's a lot of weird weather lately, and I'll bet it can be proved."
This is precisely the appeal to common sense that saps my belief in anthropogenic global warming. 'There's a lot of weird weather lately' - are you joking? You don't think there was weird weather before? Are you unfamiliar with the power of suggestion on perception? You think it can be proved? Don't you know nine out of ten statistics are made up?
Doug writes:
"If most scientists agree on something, my instinct is to think they're onto something. I realize that that that requires a certain delegation of authority from a nonscientist, who can't judge the scientists' work on their own terms, but scientific authority is just one of those things that seem well-proven enough that it's not worth the argument."
Science is not decided by consensus. It is decided by empirical verification. No scientist I know of claims that the climate change models have been verified (indeed they would find it hard to, because most of the predicted temperature changes derived from those models that were developed in the 1990s have already been refuted). When you find perfectly respectable scientists, with good records of work being dismissed as 'mavericks' and 'big oil' mouthpieces, then I think that this is a political consensus that does not derive from the facts.
Doug asks:
"Scientists told you those things, or enviros?"
Scientists. Chief govt. scientific advisor Robert Lacey predicted that a third of Britons would have contracted CJD by 1997. Mae Wan Ho and Arpad Pusztai wrote preposterous warnings against GM food. It was the UK government's scientific advisors that gave them the alarmist figures on the AIDS pandemic (I am impressed that you resisted that scare story, few people did, and the only American I remember objecting to it was Katie Roiphe, whom you rubbished on some peripheral point, as I recall). Doctor Andrew Wakefield published his paper on the dangers of MMR (now exposed as rubbish) in the British Medical Journal.