It is proven by now that the consensus is partially manufactured. The CRU emails reveal attempting to control the debate via illegitimate means: trying to shut down journals which publish skeptics, hiding data to prevent skeptics from finding flaws, and ousting skeptics from professional societies, removing editors who allow opposing views to be published.
A consensus of rational people is informative. A consensus of politics is not. There is considerable evidence that we have the latter rather than the former.
> You are not an expert, yet you disagree with the expert consensus, and because of that you are most likely wrong. It has always been that way.
1. When you say consensus, there's not a consensus in climate change the way there's a consensus about the composition of water in chemistry. The are competing theories and holes in the current theories. Asserting that there is a consensus does not create a consensus.
2. You do not need to be an expert to analyze and look at published primary source papers, secondary source papers, and popular writing. I've done so, a little bit. By no means is the current worldview proven. I gave a number of my concerns in the original post. Most of them have come from talking to other scientists who also do not agree with the general views and policy recommendations of the prominent climate change group.
3. I'm not even disagreeing with the general, mainstream view completely - I don't know what's happening, to what extent, how dangerous it is, and why it's happening. There haven't been falsifiable claims about what's going to happen in the short term that can be tested. I would like to see more research and debate.
> Mainstream views are correct more often than not.
This is both not true and extremely dangerous.
Here are a few examples off the top of my head, from a variety of fields: Mercantalism, geocentric/heliocentric universe, price controls, Newtonian Mechanics, war on drugs, absolute monarchy, papal infaliability, fascism, racism, slavery, human sacrifices, animal sacrifices, wifebeating, blood feuds, honor feuds, dueling, spoils system, aggressive warfare, appeasement, reparations... all mainstream views at one point. Some are relatively harmless, like people insisting that Earth was the center of the universe. Some have resulted in very poor social engineering, like mercantalism and price controls. And some of them have been downright horrible.
The policy recommendations by climate change scientists probably have the potential to be as damaging as mercantalism was, if implemented improperly. Mercantalism made the citizens in mercantalist countries live worse, poorer lives, with more control, and no benefits. It led to a reduction in prosperty and quality of life in mercantalist countries, and a rise of prosperity and quality of life in non-mercantalist countries. And this was the dominant mainstream view of economics for a very long time in Europe. Much longer than the current views on climate change have been around.
You need to question authority more in scientific fields. Actually, one thing that stands out very strongly to me is from Richard Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" When his first wife got very sick, he looked up her symptoms in a medical book. She matched a particular disease exactly, and there were recommendations on what to do.
The doctors diagnosed her with everything except this particular disease, and Feynman thought to himself, "Well, it seems so obvious that it's this, but if it's obvious to me, it'd be obvious to them, right? So it must be something else." Two years and four doctors later, his original diagnosis by matching her symptoms to a book were right, and the doctors were wrong. He was furious. He said he promised to question experts much more for the rest of his life after that.
Mainstream views are correct more often than not.