SeekerBlog

Steve Goddard has a nice little refresher on Wegener and plate tectonics (Wegener was opposed by the ‘consensus of scientists’). I disagree with the statement in his concluding paragraph “We see a parallel to global warming.” A valid parallel is that science is not about consensus. Goddard offers a refutation of “science is consensus” by the Wegener counterexample. That of course does not prove that the AGW hypothesis is false. Following is just the fun part of Goddard’s guest post:

(…) But how about the consensus? One of the most famous cases of consensus science gone ridiculous involved the theory of Continental Drift. In 1912, a German scientist named Alfred Wegener introduced the theory that the continents were not stationary, but rather moved.(…)

“Utter, damned rot!” said the president of the prestigious American Philosophical Society.

Anyone who “valued his reputation for scientific sanity” would never dare support such a theory, said a British geologist.

“If we are to believe in Wegener’s hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again.” Geologist R. Thomas Chamberlain

“further discussion of it merely incumbers the literature and befogs the mind of fellow students.”    Geologist Barry Willis

Enjoy.