People tend to equate science with logic. But a great deal of science isn't logic. It's simpler:
A researcher develops a hypothesis, an idea about what he thinks is going to happen if he runs an experiment. So he runs the experiment.
He observes whether his prediction came true.
If it doesn't, he goes back to the drawing board, or he tosses the hypothesis out with the coffee grinds, eggshells, and orange rinds.
If his prediction does come true, he publishes. He lays out exactly what he did and how the experiment turned out.
Then other independent researchers must repeat that experiment in exactly the same way, in order to find out whether they obtain the same outcome. If they do, the hypothesis gains credence. It becomes a theory. It graduates into a higher realm of certainty. This would constitute true consensus.
Consensus is not a gaggle of scientists or politicians or bureaucrats appearing on television and claiming there is a consensus.
It certainly isn't paid propagandists pretending there is a consensus.
A naked and preemptory statement like "the evidence is settled" or "there is overwhelming agreement among professionals" is meaningless. It's a cartoon, an imitation of the real thing.
Then we have something like this: a drug company conducts seven human clinical trials of a new medication, to test its efficacy; three of those studies show virtually no positive results, so they're buried, never to see the light of day; two studies are marred by a high drop-out rate among volunteers, because the drug has toxic effects, and those studies are hidden as well; the two remaining studies show a marginally positive effect, compared with the outcome from a similar but older drug, and those studies are published. As a result, the FDA approves the drug for human use.
And this is called science. And after the drug is approved, doctors begin giving it to patients and form an opinion that the drug is "good." And eventually this opinion is labeled "widespread consensus."
Here is another form of false cartoonish science. A newspaper publishes an article about a potential breakthrough in treating a disease with gene therapy. Reading closely, you find out the article is based on one study done by three researchers at a university. The therapy is still years away from being tested. And no other researchers have replicated the one study to see if they obtain the same results.
In fact, if you follow science journals, you'll discover that many published studies are never followed up; no one bothers to try to replicate them.
Take the case of SARS, the epidemic that never was, in 2003. When the World Health Organization (WHO) decided there was an outbreak of a new disease, a closed circle of 10 WHO labs collaborated to find the virus that was causing SARS. This, on the basis of zero evidence that SARS was a new disease or that it was the result of a virus. The labs announced the discovery of a so-called coronavirus. Subsequently, no other independent researchers replicated this finding with convincing evidence. And at the height of the "outbreak," a WHO researcher in Canada (Frank Plummer) would confess to reporters that he was puzzled by the extremely rare appearance of the coronavirus in SARS patients—which was tantamount to an admission that he had no idea what singular factor or multiple factors were making patients ill.
In the fall of 2009, CBS investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkisson, discovered that the virus supposedly causing Swine Flu was rarely found in the most likely Swine Flu patients in America. In other words, Swine Flu wasn't Swine Flu. CBS firmly put a lid on the story.
Again, the discovery of a virus causing a disease had never been verified by independent scientists outside the favored ring of government and university researchers. The consensus was invented.
In the area of vaccine research, the CDC has readily admitted that it doesn't test new vaccines (for safety and efficacy) by doing large, controlled, double-blind studies. Therefore, forget about the lack of replication. There is nothing to replicate.
And if you want to look at so-called climate science, you'll be hard-pressed to find a hypothesis at all, because there are no specific predictions about future climate that can be tested. There are alarmist warnings, but they don't count, unless Al Gore jetting around the world expelling fumes is suddenly a scientist.
In the arena of global warming, there are computer models built on algorithms, and these models purport to show past trends in warming, from which extrapolations can be made—but again, no specific predictions which can be verified or rejected. And contrary to press and government pronouncements about the "settled science" and the "overwhelming evidence," the actual history of temperature on Earth, based on readings, is fraught with difficulties and controversy. Therefore, the computer models were erected on a foundation of sand.
Again, the "consensus" is manufactured, like a Disney cartoon.
As for GMO crops, Monsanto and the other biotech giants skipped directly to conclusions from research that was never done. It claimed: the insertion of genes into plants was a precise and repeatable technology; increased crop yields would result; the food would be nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO; toxic pesticide use would diminish; no significant gene drift from field to field would occur; weeds wouldn't flourish; no human health problems would ensue.
All these conclusions were fabricated. They were claims Monsanto wanted to make; so they made them, and hired scientists to confirm them.
Public relations skills that would ordinarily shape the public image of a political candidate or show business celebrity were imported into the arena of science.
It worked. With government regulatory agencies on board, with a great deal of money to pass around, the PR took off like a rocket.
The day has not yet dawned in which a college or university will teach an authentic course called False Science. It would be counter-productive, to say the least, since governments and corporations pour research-grant monies into those institutions and expect a certain brand of compliant science.
Here is the real consensus: researchers go along to get along. Like mainstream reporters, they know what they can say and what they can't say. They see their boundaries. They understand the "logic" of compromise. They're aware their job status can take a sudden turn for the worse, if they cross into forbidden territory.
So they become players in the ground game of building illusions. They sell out their careers and their principles. They teach egregious lies to their students and assistants.
However, as a consequence, edifices of false reality become, at the same time, larger and more precarious. Precarious, because there are many more points in the structure where the injection of truth can cause a fatal effect.
When my publisher was ready to go to press with my first book, AIDS INC., Scandal of the Century, in 1988, he asked me for a quick summary he could print on the back cover. I gave him: "Virus is not the cause; definition of AIDS is worthless; treatment is poison."He went with it. It subsequently caused a bit of a stir. Those statements were and are true.
In the years since the publication of the book, independent science reporters have come up to me and told me they'd developed a few good ideas from reading my attack on official science.
They mainly saw that it was possible to make a sustained case against widespread consensus, chapter by chapter, point by point, citation by citation. They'd never seriously considered doing that. But they realized "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."
That's the ticket. I'm certainly not saying these vicious cartoon-structures dissolve overnight; but people who are awake, who possess logical tools, who are hungry for hidden facts can liberate themselves from the science that is no science.
And the number of those people is growing
I suspect that the last time 'the science that we believe we have' WAS science... Was back in the early days of quantum mechanics, around about the time that some of the smarter scientists realised that science and mysticism had been having carnal relations...
Since then science has been running around titling at windmills and molesting unicorns. And was last seen running naked around fairyland, singing the Monty Python song "I'm a lumberjack". In other words, it's away with the fairies and has bugger-all to do with reality.