Thanks Kenny. When I get into this discussions and people bring up the consensus, I always ask if they've read the consensus studies, and which one they found most convincing. I've got all kinds of answers, but I don't remember ever hearing a simple "yes".

When I had a look at Cook (2016) I noticed that he even misrepresented the findings of his own paper (2013).

The consensus position is articulated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statement that ‘human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century’

• Cook (2016)

Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.

• Cook (2013)

Apparently there's no need to make a distinction between whether humans are a cause, and humans are the dominant cause.

So Cook is really questionable. A lot of newspapers used to cite Doran and Zimmerman, which seemed to have a very questionable methodology where they surveyed over a thousand scientists, then threw out all but 77 of the surveys. So it's hard to say that they weren't just counting the hits and ignoring the misses.

Then, even if we do assume they got it right... the consensus is just that humans have an effect on the climate, but in the media it's portrayed as a consensus on catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

The whole thing stinks.

The other thing people love to say is, better safe than sorry, which I call the Pascal's wager of climate change. If there's even a small chance that it's right, better to prepare for it. Or worse, they say if we're not absolutely sure that it's not going to happen, we need to prepare for it... Coincidentally, that was almost the same line Ben Affleck used in Batman vs Superman that made us all realise that we were watching a stinker.