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Climate Change: The Keywords (Part 2 of 3)

Settled Science, Scientific Concensus


Geraldo Luís Lino

Written by Geraldo Luís Lino, special to Climate Change Dispatch The second keyword for the long overdue reassessment of the climatic issues is knowledge, meaning a more comprehensive and better understanding of the climate dynamics.

However, as a prerequisite it is necessary to clear up a concept commonly misused and abused by the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) defenders: the idea that “science is settled” and that the so-called “scientific consensus” on the subject would be objected to only by some handfuls of diehard “skeptics.” For starters, there is no such a thing like “settled science,” neither in Climatology nor in any other branch of science. The body of scientific knowledge is an open-ended and permanently ongoing construction that is always open to new evidences, new hypotheses, debate, questioning and revision – that’s how real science advances. Also, “consensus” is a concept alien to science, which is not a “democratic” activity whose advance is driven by the weight of the number of followers of a certain line of thinking or theory – but by a permanent process of convergence between new hypotheses and evidences collected in the physical world.

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