This from an earlier post on a subject unrelated to climate change: 

For me, the main lesson of these studies is...the danger of living in totalitarian environments. By “totalitarian”, I mean a social environment where there are no dissenting views expressed. Humans typically seek social validation of their views – without which, niggling reservations rarely rise to the level of conviction.

... when everyone in one's reference group appears to agree on something, it’s hard not to go along.  And it's hard to think otherwise, because we don't have sounding boards for working out our thoughts. We don't have models to give us the courage to say something. To cultivate critical thinking and the ability to disagree, we need to resist the tendency to surround ourselves with the like-minded and be willing to engage those who see things differently.

- The Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments: Just One Dissenter can Make a World of Difference

It also makes a world of difference when the scientific consensus on climate change is represented as nearly unanimous (e.g., 97%) rather than merely a large majority (e.g., 90%). The former intimidates and discourages potential dissent; the latter, not so much.

My objection to how the climate change consensus is represented has nothing to do with whether I accept the consensus. It has everything to do with how science and societies make progress: by creating space for independent thought.

Cook et al (2013) gave us the 97% consensus figure, characterizing the proportion of academic papers rejecting the consensus as "vanishingly small". Cook et al (2016) allow the consensus may be somewhat lower but insist that from "a broader perspective, it doesn't matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%." Really?

Next: Quantifying the Consensus: an Update from Cook et al 2016. Later: do we have to exaggerate consensus to spur the public to action?

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References:

Cook et al (2013) Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters 8 024024

Cook, et al (2016). Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters, 11 (4), 048002.