Yeah, scientific consensus is a valuable thing. It just means "oh like a lot of probably smart people who looked at this issue rigorously mostly agree" and that is pretty much as close to truth as we have.
It depends on your way of selecting the panel of authors, though.
eg. if you only pick people who agree with you, it's not a scientific consensus, but an echo chamber.
Sure, but that doesn't mean consensus is wrong by default. If there's evidence that mainstream academia is ignoring without good reason, that's another matter, but to my knowledge that's not the case.
Of course it's not 100% black and wide and there is an element of faith.
The consolidated statement is way to wide, but if you take consensus to mean "a large majority like 66%+ portion of the scientific literature within the field(s) relevant to that specific instance" that becomes a lot more testable for an individual issue.
That's why we go by consensus. Of course any one paper could be BS, but if 98% of scientists agree on something, then I feel fairly confident in that consensus.
You'd literally be lynched by a mob if you were to do research to disprove any of it or in fact even question the means and methods. So I'm not surprised there's "consensus". That's not to say the consensus is incorrect here, that's just to say that it doesn't mean a whole lot. Under the normal circumstances scientists never 99% "agree" on anything.
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