What will you do, when the consensus is proved a lie?
Like any rational scientist, if presented new evidence I would reassess the situation. What is frustrating about most politicians who deny climate change is not that they doubt the science (which they've probably not even reviewed in any detail), but they fear the political ramifications of taking the steps that the current best science indicates is needed.
Suppose you were the governor of a state and there was a large hurricane bearing down on your coastline. Twenty meteorologists predict it will make landfall on your coast, causing serious damage and potentially killing hundreds or thousands. One meteorologist predicts the storm will turn northward, bringing only some light rainfall. Evacuating the coast and positioning all the emergency response crews is expensive and disruptive. Do you take no action because there's one scientist who says there's no need to take action, or do you move to save lives if the the storm hits, as the vast majority of the scientists forecast?
As a political matter, there's not a governor in office who would take no action in the above hypothetical. So why would these same politicians take no action on climate change? The scientific consensus is just as strong, 20:1. The risk to property and lives is just as severe, with the high likelihood of billions of dollars in property losses. The difference is the time scale. The governor will be proven right or wrong in a matter of days with a hurricane, and his failure to act in the face of overwhelming evidence would almost surely cost him the next election. The pending climate change disaster takes longer to play out. Therefore the
cost of addressing the problem (which has political costs, too) doesn't occur in the same election cycle as the
payoff (disaster averted, property and lives saved). But this political calculus doesn't mean that the
right course of action is to do nothing.
Remember that
nothing in science is "proven." There is a
theory of gravity, which does a very good job explaining everyday interactions between objects; there is a
theory about how atoms and molecules interact, which allows modern chemistry, nuclear physics, and many other fields to move forward. But these theories are nothing more than that: hypotheses, supported by the vast preponderance of evidence. At this point, anyone who wanted to challenge either theory would have to bring some remarkably robust evidence to the table. It's possible that someday that will happen; that's how scientific revolutions occur.
In climate change, the vast preponderance of the evidence now supports the
theory that human activity is the primary cause of an unprecedentedly rapid change in the planet's climate. This
theory accords with intuition (dumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere should have a cumulative effect) and the vast proportion of observations. Of course, any scientist who can bring substantial and robust evidence against this theory can and should. But policymakers should not be frozen in their tracks because there is a tiny minority of qualified scientists who remain skeptical, just as the governor should not fail to act just because each meteorologist doesn't agree.
