Of course the book on human genetics was published in 2006 and I laughed going into it: how many claims in here are going to be known to be false to an amateur in 2014. All that aside, let’s get to AGW – another area where many will be eating crow in ten years time as observations emerge (although I can’t tell you who).

Unlike any(?) example here, AGW is mainly a quantitative forecast, not a discovery of a quality of the way things came to be (human gene pool) or the way things are (Earth goes around the sun). This particular forecast is made in terms of decades to centuries in the future. It concerns a number: will Global temperature rise 0.5C, 1C, or 5C as we double CO2 by 2050. And as others have noted, the system under study is quite complicated, some say chaotic. And it involves extrapolation: how does climate behave when it is greatly outside any conditions we have ever observed.

To be as brief as possible: we leave the world of simple physics behind after the well agreed upon observation: 2x C02 -> 4W forcing TOA * .25 (plank) -> +1.0C warming. But most alarmists propose we should expect far greater warming than 1C, and that comes from internal positive feedback in Earth climate: so instead of 1C, many alarmist see it being multiplied by a factor of 2, 3, or 5 times over. The provenance of this number is solely from the domain of computer models trying to simulate climate.

The point is: severe (high positive feedback – the kind that keeps us up at night) AGW is not like any other science I’ve seen mentioned in the post or comments. It’s not experimentally driven; it’s not derived in any formula: it’s an output parameter from a computer simulation. The question to ask is not: “When has science been wrong?” but instead “When has a simulation (100 years into the future) ever been right?”

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(I’m told David Ricardo is even better in this regard but haven’t yet gotten around to reading him.)

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The original definition of “the consensus” was roughly: (1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, (2) world temperature increased a bit in the last half of the last century, (3) human activity has been responsible for a “significant” proportion of recent warming.

Whether you take an opinion poll or look at papers you can find a pretty high level of agreement on THAT sort of consensus, but it’s because those points (especially that last one) are vague and innocuous enough that you can believe all of it and still not think it’s *a problem* or think we know the exact *amount* or think this problem is *worth doing anything about*. Disagreeing with any of these out-of-frame contentions doesn’t put one in the “3%” but still does get one labeled a “denialist” by partisans.

I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find many climate skeptics who deny there has been some measured warming between, say, 1950 and 2000, who deny that humans have caused some measurable amount of past/recent warming (merely paving roads and planting crops could accomplish that, even setting aside CO2) or who deny that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Certainly none of the high-profile ones fit that description. Can you name any?

Maybe we have different data sources, but I come across “lukewarmers” regularly and so far as I know I have yet to meet an actual “denialist”. It’s a strawman.

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But Chris didn’t give Weber as an example, but gave Rogers and Maslow. Wikipedia agrees with Scott that they are psychologists. Maybe Maslow should count as a psychologist whose theories ought to influence psychiatrists. But Rogers simply was a psychiatrist. His whole career was devoted to designing psychotherapies.

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Psychology ≠ psychiatry.

Could you say what you think the essential differences are? (Of course I already know that a psychiatrist has a medical degree and can prescribe drugs.)

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Sorry for my speling, i don’r skenz engl too well.

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