Climate Consensus

Political agendas sometimes advance through the consensus of its participants. Science generally does not. The news media both accepts and perpetuates the idea of a “climate consensus” among scientists who supposedly believe in human-caused global warming. But “climate consensus” is a political advocacy term claiming the authority of science.

“Consensus” reeks of groupthink that is antithetical to the scientific method. Science advances through the asking of open and honest questions, addressing both conventional wisdom and unexplored ideas, employing empirical analysis in experiments that may or may not produce hypotheses or working hypotheses. Replicable results, more experiments, and sometimes sheer luck advances scientific hypotheses toward scientific theory.

In any case, the great beauty of science is its utility as a method of inquiry, not as a fount of received wisdom. The idea of a “scientific consensus” quickly starts to smell like dogma. Far more useful and accurate is the concept of scientific paradigms, as Thomas Kuhn described them in his rightfully famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Scientific paradigms can be quite useful operational concepts for years and years, but as Kuhn’s title implies, revolutions overturn them. “Paradigm shift” is another way to describe this.

A paradigm shift might await the “climate consensus” regarding the idea of the greenhouse effect causing global warming. Conversely, the greenhouse effect could turn out to be valid. But the better climate scientists continue to question it rather than preach it as secular gospel, the way so many journalists routinely do. By questioning any so-called consensus, they advance climate science and remain true to the core spirit of scientific inquiry. This should not surprise us. The history of science is replete with examples of scientists overturning received wisdom. After all, geocentric astronomy and Aristotelian physics once represented a scientific paradigm. But by the time we got through the Copernicus-Kepler-Galileo-Newton revolution, we had heliocentrism.

During the 1960s, after decades of debate, geologists shifted their sciences’s paradigm to plate tectonics, the theory of ocean floors and continents being in constant geological motion. Around 1980 I took a class with an old geology professor who remembered some of his own professors who had resisted the idea of plate tectonics. That earlier generation of geologists has had a more recent counterpart in archaeologists who resisted the proposition of pre-Clovis.

Plate tectonics explained what many had previously speculated about regarding how east coast South America and west coast Africa seemed to mirror each other. (Cropped from a WikiCommons image).

For decades, “Clovis first” proponents thought there were no human artifacts in the western hemisphere older than 15,000 years. They also followed the idea of the Beringia land bridge as the sole or main human migration route that should have left the oldest human evidence in Alaska, the youngest in South America. Now we have ample evidence that invalidates the Clovis first paradigm.

Some of the pre-Clovis archaeological sites, as of 2017. Especially noteworthy are some of the South American sites that the “Clovis first” paradigm hypothesized could not be older than North American sites. (WikiCommons image).

Kuhn observed that young scientists or those new to a scientific field have often been generators of scientific revolution. Free of accumulated mental baggage, they have the potential of seeing things afresh — especially when it comes to outliers. All sciences feature outliers that contradict or at least qualify prevailing paradigms. It is understandable (and all too human) that older scientists who spent their careers wedded to an earlier paradigm would resist a new generation overturning it.

My veteran geology professor readily admitted that he and some of his equally elder colleagues, all embracing plate tectonics, had nevertheless begun forming pet theories of their own that might turn out to be inadvertently skewed. In other words, the danger of confirmation bias can settle in for any scientist who pursues a field long enough. This has probably happened to some scientists who now assume that anthropogenic climate change outweighs incredibly powerful geological causes of climate change.

As Francis Bacon warned us centuries ago, confirmation bias is fundamentally detrimental to the scientific endeavor. Or, as C.H. Waddington wrote in 1948, “scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to be true, or what one may hope to be true.”

Proponents of the climate consensus might consider what the great Zen master Shunryu Suzuki said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” Occasionally purging ourselves of our expertise can be a very healthy way to look at science (and other things) anew.

Copyright © 2026 Will Sarvis. All rights reserved.

SOURCES

Francis Bacon, First Book of Aphorisms, Aphorism XLVI, available through Fordham University’s Modern History SourceBook.

Robson Bonnichsen, et al, Paleoamerican Origins: Beyond Clovis (College Station: Texas A&M University Pr., 2005).

Thomas S. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Pr., 1970), pages 79, 82, 90, 110, 135.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (NY: Weatherhill, 1970 ), quote from page 21.

C.H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude, 2nd ed. (West Drayton Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1948), quote from page 28.