GREAT scientists such as Richard Feynman and Einstein both agreed that it didn't matter how many people believed in a theory, all it took to disprove one was a single fact.
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The supporters of man-made climate change rely very heavily on the idea that a majority or consensus of scientists support it, and therefore it must be right.
Even US President Barack Obama has accepted the idea of a consensus and that it proves man-made global warming. Mr Obama tweeted that: "Ninety-seven per cent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous."
The latest evidence for a consensus about man-made global warming comes from a recent paper by a team which includes Australian academic John Cook, who runs the pro-climate change blog site Skeptical Science.
In their paper, Cook and his team categorised the authors of scientific papers into seven groups with the first category: Explicitly [stating] that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming.
That is fairly unambiguous and represents the accepted definition of man-made global warming - that humans are the main cause of climate change.
However when a number of other scientists checked Cook's results they found that not 97 per cent of the sample of about 12,000 scientists were in that category, but fewer than 1 per cent.
More scientists believed in category six, which said: Explicitly minimises or rejects that humans are causing global warming.
In addition, none of Cook's categories described man-made global warming as dangerous as Mr Obama tweeted, but that in itself shows how much the issue has been politicised.
The politicisation of man-made global warming was further shown by the comments made by certain politicians about the recent bushfires in Australia and the dreadful typhoon in the Philippines.
Despite the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in its latest report explicitly stating that there is no conclusive evidence to support a connection between man-made global warming and extreme weather events such as the bushfires or the typhoon in the Philippines, that has not stopped politicians such as Adam Bandt and Christine Milne claiming such events as proof of man-made climate change.
In fact, according to a leading pro-man-made climate change scientist, Professor Richard Muller from the University of California, a lack of extreme weather events may be a proof of global warming.
According to Professor Muller, in a warming world the poles warm up relative to other parts of the world and that decreases the temperature differences between parts of the Earth. Extreme weather depends on a strong temperature gradient and the energy that provides. If those energy gradients are decreasing then logically there should be fewer extreme events.
This is the problem now with man-made global warming; it has become politicised and even ideologically driven. Not to mention driving vast investment and expenditure by governments and corporations.
Whenever politics and money become involved, scientific independence takes a back seat.
I don't think either Feynman or Einstein would approve of the consensus or politicisation of extreme weather disasters.
Anthony Cox is a member of the Climate Sceptics.