Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the literature
Man this comments section is a cesspool.<p>The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings.<p>Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice&#x2F;recommendations&#x2F;engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn&#x27;t exist).<p>The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies.
Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less &quot;we sat around and decided X is true&quot; but rather &quot;there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true&quot;. This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example).<p>So no. 99% consensus in science isn&#x27;t that uncommon and no it&#x27;s generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein&#x27;s photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus.<p>This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an &quot;opinion&quot; and that scientists are just voicing &quot;opinions&quot;. This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don&#x27;t know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.