The problem comes when people forget scientific consensus isn’t set in stone. Science is a continuous process of discovery and refinements, not a final declaration. Especially when so many studies are flawed, or their results cannot be reproduced.

But the public at large, politicians, and most business interest desire the comfort of facts, so people have a tendency to want to believe things are more settled and concrete than they may actually be.

I am grateful, by contrast, that my med school professors frequently declared “ten years from now, perhaps half of what we’re teaching you today will have been proven incorrect”. While half is an exaggeration, I’ve certainly been astonished at how much has changed so dramatically in such a short time.

Of course we just have to do the best we can with what we know at any particular time. So if the climate consensus is pointing one way, by all means let’s follow the bread crumbs. But overconfidence can be a dangerous comfort.

Science is not determined by consensus. It's determined by fact. If 100% of scientists paid for by a government declare what the government wants to hear as "fact", it does not become fact. Especially if it's based on arbitrary models that have been shown wrong. In the 1970s the "scientific consensus" was about global cooling, now it's about global warming, and Al Gore promised that Manhattan would be submerged underwater by now. The truth is, there is no model proven to be accurate in predicting the Earth's climate even over a timeframe of 50 years.

So why have the government's scientists not changed their tune in 2016? Why were the saying the same things during the Bush years that they said during the Obama years?