A Good Climate Policy: You Can't Get There From Here

Climate Etc has another post featuring sociologists/psychologists, "Against Consensus Messaging", where a commenter made the ridiculou claim that "consensus is an important part of the scientific method." My response to that comment, and to the blog's host, Dr. Judith Curry:

The scientific method only encompasses the discovery and objective verification of truth--a true understanding of a thing, a system or a process. Consensus is just a collective opinion about a thing, and has only a potential, tangential relation to the scientific method, a potential that is not realized unless the consensus opinion reflects the objective truth discovered and verified by the scientific method. Consensus is not "an important part of the scientific method", it does not in fact have any value in and of itself; it is, at best, only worthwhile to the extent it reflects the truth. That is why, as we now see everyday, even a consensus of authoritative experts, even of "97% of everybody", is worthless today--because the experts are all incompetent, before definitive evidence against their supposed understanding.

And blogs like this, addicted to sociological misdirections, away from the objective truth into the mire of mere opinion (collective or otherwise), merely thrash around in the mire, going nowhere and helping not at all (or only to the extent that they show just how incompetent the experts, like Dr. Curry, all are now).

Or to put it bluntly, sociology and psychology cannot enlighten physics, or any physical science. Dr. Curry needs to learn that her pursuit of good climate policy marks her as fundamentally deluded, because there is no such thing. "You can't get there from here", because there is no "here" here, where you continue vainly to focus your attention on opinion-making.

But I have been saying as much for about 5 years now, so I know you who feel yourselves to be part of a working system--a working scientific method, above all--are not heeding the evidence to the contrary (ironically, the sociological and psychological evidence, of the benighted and dysfunctional public and political debate).