Galileo -- and many others who followed -- proved that empirical evidence is vastly more important than claims of a "consensus."
That remains true today.
I certainly don't know everything, but I do know, from your past posts, that's not a conclusion you would come up with on your own, especially expressed that way.
Then again we have this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy
Scientific consensus
For any subject, scientific consensus is normally achieved through communication at conferences, publication in the scientific literature, replication (reproducible results by others) and peer review. In the case of global warming, many governmental reports, the media in many countries, and environmental groups, have stated that there is virtually unanimous scientific agreement that human-caused global warming is real and poses a serious concern.[43][44][45] According to the United States National Research Council,
[T]here is a strong, credible body of evidence, based on multiple lines of research, documenting that climate is changing and that these changes are in large part caused by human activities. While much remains to be learned, the core phenomenon, scientific questions, and hypotheses have been examined thoroughly and have stood firm in the face of serious scientific debate and careful evaluation of alternative explanations. * * * Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.[46]
Among opponents of the mainstream scientific assessment, some say that while there is agreement that humans do have an effect on climate, there is no universal agreement about the quantitative magnitude of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) relative to natural forcings and its harm to benefit ratio.[47] Other opponents assert that some kind of ill-defined "consensus argument" is being used, and then dismiss this by arguing that science is based on facts rather than consensus.[48] Some highlight the dangers of focusing on only one viewpoint in the context of what they say is unsettled science, or point out that science is based on facts and not on opinion polls or consensus.[49][50]
Dennis T. Avery, a food policy analyst at the Hudson Institute wrote an article entitled "500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares"[51] published in 2007 by the The Heartland Institute. After the publishing of this article, numerous scientists who had been included in the list demanded their names be removed after the list was immediately called into question for misunderstanding and distorting the conclusions of many of the named studies and/or citing outdated, flawed studies that had long been abandoned and deemed inaccurate.[52][53][54] The Heartland Institute refused requests by scientists to have their names removed, stating that the scientists "have no right—legally or ethically—to demand that their names be removed from a bibliography composed by researchers with whom they disagree"[55] despite the aforementioned falsification and refutation of much of the list.[56]
A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analysed "1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that (i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers".[57][58] Judith Curry has said "This is a completely unconvincing analysis", whereas Naomi Oreskes said that the paper shows that "the vast majority of working [climate] research scientists are in agreement [on climate change]... Those who don't agree, are, unfortunately—and this is hard to say without sounding elitist—mostly either not actually climate researchers or not very productive researchers".[58][59] Jim Prall, one of the coauthors of the study, acknowledged "it would be helpful to have lukewarm [as] a third category".[58]
A 2013 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters analyzed around 12,000 papers published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature between 1991 and 2011, identified by searching the ISI Web of Science citation index engine for the text strings “global climate change” or “global warming”. About ⅓ of these papers expressed an opinion about global warming in their abstract, and of these, 97% endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming.[41]
There more, but that handle it quite well, but I'll leave this for you to absorb these few points. In short, not everything can or has to be proved to absolute certainty to be valid.
