I remember a big ‘consensus’ issue – which is still going on. My memory may not be 100%, but this is what I recall:

In the early ’70′s, physicist Alan Guth of M.I.T. postulated that the proton decays over time. Dr Guth persuaded a ‘consensus’ of physicists that proton decay was real, and he proposed an elaborate experiment to prove it. Dr Guth certainly didn’t expect the ‘consensus’ opinion to be falsified.

[Falsification is essential to the scientific method; if a conjecture can be proven false (falsified), it's not scientifically valid. But if it cannot be proven false, it becomes a scientific theory; like the theory of gravity]. See: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0707.1161v2

So in 1982, in order to test Dr Guth’s proton decay physicists built a huge [and very expensive] detector thousands of feet underground called the Kamiokande. But the Kamiokande detector failed to prove that the proton decays, as predicted by scientific ‘consensus.’

Governments and scientists did not give up. Next, they built Kamiokande II in 1985. The scientific consensus was overwhelming that this new, 10X more sensitive detector would prove that the proton decays over time [the lifetime of a proton was assumed - by consensus - to be about 1036 years].

Kamiokande II failed to find any evidence of proton decay. But many physicists were certain that the proton decays [since they had staked their reputations on it]. They prevailed on the government to spend more $billions, and Superkamiokande [SuperK] was completed in 1996. Why? Because the overwhelming scientific consensus was still that the proton decays over time into lighter subatomic particles.

But the ultra-sensitive SuperK failed to show any evidence of proton decay.

The consensus for proton decay was getting a little shaky after many so many $billions were spent [although a few scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovery of neutrinos from supernovas by using the K and SuperK detectors and studying the results for over many years - at a time when the Nobel Prize was more respected than it is now].

Even though the consensus for the proton decay conjecture was finally eroding [after burning through much of the U.S. science budget, thereby starving many other programs], the search for proton decay had taken on an inertia of its own.

In 2006, the latest and greatest detector was put on-line: the SuperK II. As you can probably guess, the SuperK II has shown zero evidence of proton decay. More than $20 billion has been spent so far on the proton decay conjecture – based on the ‘consensus’ of physicists.

It hasn’t been money completely wasted. The purpose of the scientific method is to show whether a conjecture can be falsified. In the case of proton decay, the conjecture was falsified — forcing scientists to acknowledge that they needed a new and entirely diffeerent theory, to provide a hypothesis as to why the proton does not decay.
[snip]

Here is a bit I wrote on Enron and Carbon Trading. Excerpted from a link provided in the above writing.

Enron commissioned its own internal study of global warming science. It turned out to be largely in agreement with the same scientists that Enron was trying to shut up. After considering all of the inconsistencies in climate science, the report concluded: “The very real possibility is that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed.”

One of Enron’s major consultants in that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, who started the whole global warming mess in 1988 with his bombastic congressional testimony. Recently he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicting exactly the same inconsequential amount of warming in the next 50 years as the scientists that Enron wanted to gag.

They were a decade ahead of NASA. True to its plan, Enron never made its own findings public, self-censoring them while it pleaded with the Bush administration for a cap on carbon dioxide emissions that it could broker. That pleading continues today – the remnant-Enron still views global warming regulation as the straw that will raise it from its corporate oblivion.

”Enron stood to profit millions from global warming energy-trading schemes,” said Mike Carey, president of the Ohio Coal Association and American Coal Coalition. The investigation into the collapse of Enron will reveal much more about the intricacies of the Baptist-bootlegger coalition which was promoting the Kyoto cause within the Republican Party and within US business circles. Coal-burning utilities would have had to pay billions for permits because they emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That would have encouraged closing coal plants in favor of natural gas or other kinds of power plants, driving up prices for those alternatives. Enron, along with other key energy companies in the so-called Clean Power Group – El Paso Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine – would make money both coming and going – from selling permits and then their own energy at higher prices. If the Kyoto Protocol were ratified and in full force, experts estimated that Americans would lose between $100 billion and $400 billion each year. Additionally, between 1 and 3.5 million jobs could be lost. That means that each household could lose an average of up to $6,000 each year. That is a lot to ask of Americans just so large energy companies can pocket millions from a regulatory scheme. Moreover, a cost of $400 billion annually makes Enron’s current one-time loss of $6 billion look like pocket change.

from: Investigate Magazine March 2006

Even generally reputable sources, such as the New York Times, (see below), may on occasion distort reality, but they are honest in comparison to the source referenced above.

Excerpt from August 26, New York Times article: … Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen also agree that the NASA data glitch had no effect on the global temperature trend, nudging it by an insignificant thousandth of a degree. … This NYT article seems more like an op-ed than a science report, and could be considered to be misleading in the way it presents information out of context. Reality may better be described as follows?
http://www.climateaudit.org/ amply indicates that McIntyre has serious doubts about US and world data and methods of analysis and measurements. The most important part about the 0.15 C error is that the programs used by NASA did not detect the error and the error of 0.15 C for a 6 year period is not trivial when applied to the US.