“There’s no need to shout. An individual can make any theory he chooses. But it only has currency when a consensus is reached. That’s the value of a consensus.”
Apperently there is a need to shout since so many people are deaf to the truth. I thought some people might have finally tumbled to it when the “global warming” fraud, driven entirely by the “consensus” idea of “peer review” was revealed for what it is.
A hypothesis only becomes a theory when it has been verified by reality, not how many people agree with it. Every advance in science has been against the accepted “consensus” view, from anesthesia to “heavier then air human flight.” It is not the opinion of any number of people that establishes any truth, it is reality itself, and whatever is an incorrect description of any aspect of reality, it is not true, no matter how many people agree with it.
Consensus is a great method for putting over lies, it is worse than useless in science.
Hank
There was never a consensus among climatologists that global warming is good theory. Newspapers and some politicians decided it was fact. And a vocal group of climatologists got a lot of money for writing reports that supported the theory.
A hypothesis only becomes a theory when it has been verified by reality, not how many people agree with it.
Popular opinion and the newspapers may think that a theory is verified. But that is not the way science works. A theory is never verified. All you can do is test the theory by taking measurements. If the measurements come within some tolerance of the predicted results, then you can say the measurements support the theory. But no theory is ever verified. It you ever wrote up a report in a physics lab in college and said your experiment verified a theory, you would get an F.