Climate Change: How Valuable is the "Consensus?"

With respect to my recent piece on climate science, a reader points out:  What is today’s “consensus” may not be tomorrow’s.

Yes, the consensus can be wrong.  In fact, it always is, in one way or another. It would be foolish to think that, for instance, medical science 200 years from now will hold onto a single one of our current notions of health, disease, etc., or that physics won’t experience another new paradigm like relativity or quantum mechanics. But that doesn’t mean that reasonable people with cancer today should want to be treated with rhinoceros horn or quartz crystals, or that we should look forward to traveling through time.

The same applies to climate change deniers; it’s not rational to hold a belief about a matter of science that is opposed by the vast majority of the scientists who have made this arena the subject of their life’s work.