Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of those points. I didn’t mean to imply that the consensus is always correct (although my poorly-worded comment above plainly le

Yeah, I don’t disagree with any of those points. I didn’t mean to imply that the consensus is always correct (although my poorly-worded comment above plainly leaves the door open on that), just that as an untrained layman you need to have the humility to refrain from forming an opinion against the consensus. Hot takes unwanted, basically. There is definitely a process of pushback and mediation between consensus and dissenting voices in any complex field that needs to happen, but agree that that is very difficult in the current political climate. I was going to say that there should be some (self-imposed) threshold of expertise to participate in these conversations, but I guess if policies affect peoples’ lives then they should ipso facto have the right to form an opinion on them. Personally, my concerns about the integrity of any scientific consensus generally are in this case, on balance, outweighed by the potential consequences of denying climate change and being wrong about it, versus accepting it at face value, doing something about it, then finding out later that it was wasted effort. But that’s a different (and perhaps better) argument from the one I was making above.