The consensus is there in terms of Global Warming, all the claims of scads of scientists who don’t believe it is man made, how somehow being in favor of Global Warming/Client change is about ‘making money’ (really? I would think you could make a lot more money from the Koch Brothers and from the oil and gas companies, they have billions and billions to spend).
In some ways, the skeptic argument is much like the fundamentalist Christian deniers of evolution (not surprisingly, most fundamentalist Christians also think global warming is a lie, that God would never let that hapen, that God wants us to use oil and gas, etc), it rests on stating half truths and using disagreements about specific points to knock the whole theory (for example, if scientists are not sure, for example, how exactly intelligence developed,and there are disagreements how evolution could lead to higher intelligence, it means that science doesn’t know the answer and therefore that shows evolution isn’t true). For example, scientists on global warming do have disagreements on the time line, Al Gore showing Florida under water in 15 years was ridiculous, for example. And some scientists agree that global warming is mostly man made, but they don’t think there is much we can do about it so should spend time preparing for a different world climate. Scientists disagree about the models and their projections, but almost every science based organization has over time come around to agree global climate change is real and it is caused mostly by man made activity. Every argument it is natural has been analyzes, and rejected as evidence mounts, solar radiation has not increased much in the last almost 60 years it has been measured, the warming cycle of of the earth based on ice ages and so forth is too long, and the ‘climate flips’ that deniers use, like Greenland suddently warming up for a couple of hundred years about 10,000 years ago, has been shown to be a local effect.
Most impressive to me is some of the skeptics who were working for the Koch brothers and the like, after analyzing all the data, have dropped their objections. A prominent skeptic at Berkeley, who was paid for by Charles Koch, said that he couldn’t in good conscience deny the facts. The only groups that still deny global warming, other than the creationist idiots (who aren’t scientists so their opinion doesn’t matter anyhow) are some of the groups representing meteorologists (ya know, the whether clucks on tv and radio). I have seen them trotted out as ‘experts’ who deny global warming, problem with that is meteorologists compared to climate scientists is like comparing a physicist to a garage mechanic,meteorology is more of a technical trade then research science.
For me personally, it is the trend of wacky weather accelerating. Australia is seeing a rough winter, while England is seeing higher than normal heat Waves. Boston is buried under a ton of snow, while Alaska is ridiculously warm and snowless. California has a drought where Snowfall is 7% of normal, while other places see massive storms and floods, and so forth. One of the biggest indicators to me is the winds we see around here, I have lived in this area my whole life, and we never, ever saw the numbers of days with high winds we see now, the NJ shore is getting increased flooding every year, and the cause isn’t tides or freak storms, it is high winds. Weather forecasts also have become less accurate, despite incredibly fast computers and better weather models, it used to be weather forecasts for 48 hours were pushing 90% accuracy, they now are down around 80%, despite all the advances in computers and modelling technology, and this has all happened during the time I have been an adult (well, okay, supposedly an adult).