“I didn’t say they were synonymous; I said scientists obtain agreed values through repeated measurements. And such things do get described as consensus value as, to pick some purely random examples, with the Earth’s mass here or the Hubble constant here.”
No. No. No. “Agreeing” on something isn’t what is meant by a “consensus”. Do you dispute the published mass of the Earth? Publish your calculations. They will either be found to be right or wrong. It’s math. There’s no issue for “denying” or “alarmism”. Since you agree that a measurement is not obtained or established by consensus, stop using the terms synonymously. If I were to say “The scientists voted and elected this answer as the right one” you would rightly see that I was crazy. That’s not how science works. But that is all anyone is saying when they say “The consensus of climate scientists is that…”
You’ve said that the word “consensus” is a trap for suckers, a concession that the science isn’t sound. Are you going to argue that applies in cases like this, the way the ID crowd have, or maybe consider that word doesn’t quite have the connotations Crichton assumes?
So you have moved from Arguments from Authority to Ad Hominem Arguments: “You say there is no place for consensus in science. But the AoUP as argued for the authenticity of the theory of Evolution based on consensus. So you must believe the world is 6000 years old.”
To answer your other question, arguing from consensus has the same lack credibility coming from the AoUP as it does from anyone else. The AoUP self-evidently doesn’t know how to mount a scientific argument or have decided that is not the right tack in this situation (and they are engaging in politics here, not science, soooo not surprising). Rather than demonstrate why ID is wrong, they have opted to declare a creed. This is the equivalent of “the Pope has declared”.
