Folks,
Just a caution on: All the experts agree, there is a consensus of the all the relevant authorities, there is wide public support of the experts, it is a/the greatest moral issue of the times, etc., etc.
Most of you ( I hope) know that Johannes Kepler was the father of modern astronomy, he worked out the laws of planetary motion, in an era where, until then recent times, "the experts" believed that everything revolved around the earth.
As Galileo found out the hard way, only narrowly escaping execution for disputing the consensus, as dictated by the Church.
But back to Kepler, in around 1620, he had to abandon his work, he had to defend his mother from charges of witchcraft, which carried a death sentence.
All the "relevant authorities" and "opinion makes" of the era, the "scientific experts", the population at large, all agreed that witchcraft was the major problem facing civilization, indeed the very existence of the human race was threatened by witchcraft.
As I an sure you all know, witchcraft, the ultimate evil, was the manifestation of the devil on earth, and therein lay the existential threat to civilisation. Or so everyone was convinced --- and the majority, particularly the experts, the educated classes, can't be wrong, can they??
Such was the threat to civil society, that it is estimated that around around 50,000 people were executed between 1500 and 1700 ( this was the era of the voyages of the great navigators --- all operating on agreed scientific principles, remember a bloke called Cook) as a result of convictions for witchcraft, having been subject to all the proper processes of "the law", which was based on the irrefutable knowledge, the "conventional wisdom" of the "experts" of the day. Of course, as was the "scientific" practices of the era, that the methods used to extract "confessions" were gruesome in the extreme, by our standards, but considered quite appropriate "in the day", given the seriousness of the threat to society of the "actions of the agents of the devil on earth".
And a confession is obviously the best proof of the crime, the "truth", isn't that undeniably correct??
It took Johannes Kepler a protracted period of time to mount an ultimately successful defense of his mother, Katharina, who had even spent some months in around 1621 chained to a cell floor, such was the concern if such a powerful witch came into contact with a susceptible subject.
Kepler's defence of his mother was, apparently, a tour de force of genuine scientific reasoning as we would understand it, he was said to have been very good at highlighting dependencies and logical flaws in the "expert" evidence for the prosecution, despite almost universal condemnation for flying in the face of the "consensus of experts". Fortunately for his mother, he succeeded.
Do you see the parallel here --- global warming, man-made, is the greatest threat to mankind, to the degree that anybody who even has the temerity to suggest a contrary case is howled down by the mob, and that mob includes all the "experts" etc., etc., etc.
But there are some really serious and genuine doubts about what is going on, and just what is the cause ----
And is it really a smart idea to be rapidly de-industrialising Australia in pursuit of a "low carbon future" when our Chief Scientist testifies under oath, before the Senate, that even eliminating Australia's 1.3% share of the annual "carbon" output completely, will make zero difference.
My personal view: The earth is slowly warming, how could it be else, we are coming out of the Maunder minimum of the 1600s. But, given the human activity accounts for only about 3% of the annual carbon cycle, our contribution to a cycle of temperature changes is very limited, given the geological history of temperature change.
Indeed, one of the greatest mathematicians of our (or any) age, Dyson Freeman, believes that it is presumptuous in the extreme of the human population that its 3% is the whole reason, and that we can do much about it.
After all, well within recorded human history, Greenland was once green, that's why it is called Greenland, Nordic races of the era grazed cattle on the island.
Tootle pip!!
For a little light reading: The Astronomer and the Witch, Professor Ulinka Rublack, Professor of early Modern History, St.John's College, Cambridge.