Comments 1 to 2:

1. dvaytw at 15:10 PM on 25 July, 2015

   I'm a big fan of Potholer.  That said, I'm less than crazy about this one.  I don't like this point at all:
   
   "We don't know if there's a consensus on ~any~ scientific theory"
   
   This is just the kind of out-of-context quote that denialists love to grab at, and in this case, it wouldn't even be too much of an egregious cherry pick, because, while Potholer goes on to say you ~could~ count citations and so forth, he doesn't actually come out and explain that, yes, in fact, this has essentially been done in John Cook et al and others.  Nor does he mention the IPCC assessments, which to me already seem the most explicit statements of a consensus opinion on Earth.  

   Maybe I'm missing subtlety here, but trust me: if I missed it, fence-sitters without much opinion missed it more, and denialists, ten times as much.

   Also, he goes on rather a lot about the "Conspiray Theory" Tim Ball episode.  It is really funny and incredible - but a bit trivial.  

   What I was hoping to hear more about was denialist canards about appeals to consensus... things like "Science isn't done by consenus" or "The consenus has been wrong before", "That's just an Argumentum ad Populum" etc.  I realize some of these aspects have been addressed well by Orac, Steven Novella and others, but it would be nice to hear them addressed in Potholer's particular style in a video format.  

    

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2. bozzza at 17:38 PM on 26 July, 2015

   Science is done by consensus and it starts with nomenclature!

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