Read the rest of the article at the link above..at the end of the article, it references and links to this article, of which I posted a snippet below:
http://crev.info/2013/05/scientists-can-agree-on-things-that-arent-so/
Scientists Can Agree on Things that Aren’t So
Whenever you hear “all scientists agree” or “we now know,” it’s no guarantee a finding won’t be disputed years later. In the following examples, CEH focuses not so much on the content of the disputed subjects as the implications for philosophy of science.
The big warmup: One very strong consensus among establishment scientists right now is that humans are causing global warming. Science Daily reported a survey of 4,000 abstracts of scientific papers that indicated an “overwhelming consensus among scientists,” as high as 97%, “that recent warming is human-caused” (cf. fallacy of statistics). Yet contrary data still arise from time to time. For instance, New Scientist reported that re-analysis of global temperatures over the last decade shows that “Earth will warm more slowly over this century than we thought it would” – diminishing some of the frantic appeals for immediate action of past years. Apparently the rate of heating hit a plateau even with more greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. It doesn’t change the consensus; the new data are just “buying us a little more time to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and prevent dangerous climate change,” the article continued. Likewise, PhysOrg spun the new data to mean that we still face a “Dire outlook despite global warming ‘pause’,” according to the study published in Nature Geoscience. Skeptics of global warming like to point out that a few decades ago, the consensus warned that Earth was approaching a period of global cooling that would have drastic effects on human life.
What will the consensus believe about climate change in a few years or decades? Nobody knows. It’s instructive, though, to look at other examples of shifting consensus in science.
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