Readers with very good memories may recall a story from 2013, wherein a guest post at WUWT made the argument that because climate change is a complicated question with many potential answers, the consensus on human causation is actually evidence that humans are not responsible. Confused? You should be. The idea that the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change is evidence that humans DON'T cause climate change is mind boggling, to say the least.
In response to the recent “Consensus on consensus” paper, Judith Curry decided to revisit and endorse this three-year-old paradox. Hot Whopper and Quark Soup both appropriately point and laugh at this, with Sou suggesting that this means Curry must not accept evolution, the big bang, atoms or, well, everything else in science, and David doing a quick debunking of the science at play. But neither note one classic climate conspiracy that Curry embraces.
In Curry's concluding comments, she claims that experts surveyed for consensus studies haven’t done “an independent assessment” and only accept the reality of man-made climate change “based on the second-order evidence that a ‘consensus’ exists” and that the consensus was “manufactured by the IPCC in response to perceived desires of policy makers.”
So, according to Curry, scientists only think there’s a consensus because the IPCC told them there’s a consensus. But since the IPCC is a literature review, an analysis of existing studies that can only reflect the state of the science, where did it get the evidence of a consensus in the first place? How could it “manufacture” a consensus by summarizing the science as it currently stands?
The only (il)logical answer is that the IPCC unlocked the secret of time travel, went back in time to “manufacture" studies to make it look like there's a consensus that climate change is man-made, and cited these in future reports to convince scientists, thereby creating the basis for studies like Cook’s that prove the existence of a consensus.
Sounds like someone might have seen Interstellar one time too many...
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