Yes, the cutline ("caption") for the illustration on my blog article ends with a link to Google Books which also provides the same read as Amazon, about the first ten pages, including most of the chapter on "The Right to Your Opinion."

Just as an aside, in 1966, for a high school summer job, I sterilized glassware in a genetics lab. One day, they sent me to the library to get educated. In one textbook about 20 years old, it said that humans have 48 chromosomes, 2 pairs of 24. But when geneticists re-worked their karyotypes, no one was accused of denial, and no one pointed to the consensus of 97% of geneticists. Instead, the facts spoke.

Consensus exists. It does not come from polling. Climate consensus does come from polling. Moreover, where consensus is lacking, in most sciences, you do not find "deniers." Is the known universe expanding? What is "dark matter"?

One difference is that while there is federal funding for astronomy, the stargazers are not demanding that we give up refrigerating our food in order to prevent the continued expansion of the universe into oblivion or that we maintain "small nutrino footprints" for the good of unborn generations.

Now, those might be good proposals, but no one is making them. With the climate, on the other hand, we do have political consequences, laws, ultimately.

I have a couple of other writing projects right now, but I intend to pen a "climate science" piece for the Gulch. I have had graduate classes in remote sensing and geographic information systems. Warming is real.

Anyone can look at the book at https://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Against... where there is a full table of contents, some pages available for reading, and a search facility.

For example, the opening pages describe the fallacy of the equivocal "right to an opinion" that you have referred to elsewhere and which has been obnoxiously employed on this forum.

As some of the more independent climate scientists point out, saying that man can have some effect on climate and observing that climate changes over time is not at all the same as saying that 97% of scientists agree with the climate hysteria "save the planet" movement blaming man for the dominant trends in climate change and concluding that it means the world is coming to an end unless we adopt draconian government controls and prohibitions, then accuse any one who refuses to go along as being a "climate denier". There are no "climate deniers".

The whole climate hysteria movement is ideological and political, appealing to some fragments of science but misintegrating them into an ideology rationalistically concocted far from the realm of science. The "97% of scientists" slogan and the rhetoric about "climate deniers", both employed for intimidation, are only part of their dogma.

Rational consensus is a result of proven facts becoming widely known. It is an informal result of science. It does not mean that any "consensus" defines science so you had better go along with groupthink, made even worse when the nature of the "consensus" appealed to is equivocal and ideological. Scientists do not get together and vote on a consensus to decide what is true, which everyone is then expected to believe. Yet the most obnoxious of the movement groupies, who wouldn't know real science if they tripped over it, treat "scientific consensus" as an authority like a religion.

Even a normal informal consensus is not uniformly reliable and not a standard. Many people believe something to be true because those they respect those who believe it, not because they have understood the validation first hand themselves. This is even true, for example, when believing what was in the text books you learned it from because you respect the reputation of the authors, the arguments seem plausible, and at least of some of the applications seem correct. It's important to always retain the reasons why you believe something in order to maintain its proper status in your mind, to correct anything you find wrong, and look for what other implications it may have had in the rest of your knowledge. Relying simply on consensus is deadly. Collective subjectivism is not objectivity.

When some science becomes politicized, however, the problem becomes much worse, as we see now. It isn't hard to understand why even those legitimately working in some aspect of that or some other science can climb on a bandwagon for something they don't know first hand. The influence of government money is only part of the problem. It's all made worse by a gradually spreading bad epistemology. Individuals can be quite competent in their own narrow specialty but still have a bad philosophy leading them astray.

The very first words in the linked blog post are "According to most geologists..."

This is either going over my head or the criticism of the phrase "scientific consensus" is desperate wishful thinking from people who don't like what science is finding.

Well, yes, that is true. I know Kuhn's work, of course. Consensus in science is real. However, the claim against it is simply that we do not vote. "Most scientists" can believe this or that, but they do not running opinion polls.

You must know the works of John McPhee. I have a review of In Suspect Terrain on my blog, here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... We all know that Alfred Wegener had to fight against an intransigent establishment when he proposed continental drift. Now, however, plate tectonics is apparently used to explain events that have other causes entirely. But in any case, the "consensus" did not come from open polling.

I note that when arguing the Copenhagen Interpretation, no one cites the number of physicists who agree with one claim or another.

"97% of climate scientists agree..." is based on those who accept government funding and the premise that AGW is real."
Yes, it's begging the question. It's similar to arguing No true Scotsman.

"As he said, science does not rest on consensus."
Is this actually true? On its face, it seems wrong. It seems like research develops models. Most science is Kuhn's "normal science", refining those models and finding anomalies. Eventually someone finds a better model.

Paraphrasing Asimov, the most exciting phrase in science is not Eureka, but rather That's funny....

Outside my area, I heard of the consensus shifting on the role of fats and cholesterol in heart disease. I heard of the consensus changing on whether the future of the universe is a big crunch or big freeze. I don't understand science without consensus.

I do not have the book here. It was a library book, and I can get it again, of course. If you want to discuss the book, then I recommend the book over my review.

As for Anthropogenic Global Warming, I agree with you that in the debate linked on GGOL, the two women are arguing at each other and past each other. As you note, the young woman is asserting the hypothesis (begging the question). But the climate denier is also skipping a step.

Here on GGOL more recently is a link to the founder of the Weather Channel, John Coleman, claiming that the figure "... 97% of climate scientists agree..." is based on those who accept government funding and the premise that AGW is real. Again, though, that is a separate claim, not proof or disproof of AGW. As he said, science does not rest on consensus.

It is a fact that cities are warmer than their surrounding countrysides.

Hello CG, I don't think anyone denies that the climate changes and that it always has an always will. In fact, I think most are aware that ALL planets (perhaps moons too) have climate change. Climate change is nature in action.

Why people distrust government findings and those FUNDED by tax dollars through the government, is that there has been fraudulent information manufactured AND promoted heavily to pass crippling legislation to collar American industry while leaving heavy weights like China, India and Russia unhindered. If the science wasn't funded by governments and championed by politicians I think the danger man poses to the planet would have 1) a more specific name 2) a scientific method that never relied on falsified manufactured data and 3) wouldn't need consensus to validate its reality.

You don't need to lie about things to prove them when you've used empirical evidence to feed your scientific method.

My 2 bits.

It sounds like a good baloney detection kit. (I think Carl Sagan invented that phrase.)

I did not not understand in the case of Jack and Jill, why Jill was begging the question. It seems like they leaped from regulation to poverty to property rights without saying why.

When I think of begging the question I think of the exchange between that young woman and the climate change denier :https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...
The denier rejects the young woman's evidence because it came from a gov't source. The young woman responds by saying the data is trustworthy because the gov't it came from has an excellent record of fighting climate change. The young woman is clearly begging the question because her claim rests on a premise that is also what she's trying to prove.