There's nothing scientific about scientific consensus.
Scientists have no use for a formal consensus... scientists work on the edges where the consensus is in the process of being formed or reformed. Actual written-down consensus basically consists of introductory textbooks, where it's generally left up to the self-discipline of the authors not to insert (too much) of their own take on less-settled questions, plus tedious hair-splitting rules about naming newly-discovered items (species, asteroids).
Engineers (in the case of medicine, physicians) have a consensus, but they don't do science — engineers work in terms of known principles, not new discoveries.
Traditionally, getting information from the scientists to the engineers was slow and haphazard.
Things like the Cochrane Collaboration are an attempt to get information faster from the scientists to the engineers (physicians), but it's a new endeavour, itself poorly studied and characterised, and generally concerns itself purely with medicine. That's great — I want to live forever — but it doesn't really help with other important questions, like the climate.
My impression is that given the degree to which the question of global warming has been politicised, it is impossible for our currently-primitive tools (systematic reviews and the like) to objectively discern what the scientific consensus is.
Which is a pity, because it's quite possible that something is there, and that something could be done, but we have no reliable way of knowing what or how much. All we can do is guess, as with the recent Clean Energy legislation, and hope our guesses are in the right ballpark.
⇦ Ripple vs the functions of money | ⇨ FOSS is political |
