It's unfortunate that some inaccurate predictions are used as "justification" to discredit research which has actually been conducted and communicated rather carefully for the most part. The predictions made have often been conservative with in the level of indicated catastrophe to prevent exactly the sort of backlash of alarmist-alarmism you are now espousing.
I've debated the topic for over a decade now. You make it sound like the majority of the research is sound or that the majority of the actors are good and honest.
The layout on the ground is true to how the grandparent lays it out. Questions are rejected. Doubts are branded as essentially unfaithful. Credentials are waved as proof of correctness instead of evidence combined with ideas, all while people with differing beliefs or ideas are stripped of their credentials, or have them invalidated. It's a recipe for close minded and one sided discourse.
The problems in science, as practiced today in academia, are legion. Meta science show the accuracy of the general landscape is poor. Common errors abound, papers that are considered the gold standards for years are shown to be built on faulty premise, code, methodology, etc.
To be fair, doing it right is HARD. Throw in even some mild corruption, bias in funding, dismissal of the skeptical, peg career advancement to publishing metrics (It's like measuring productivity by lines of code checked in. Once everyone knows it's happening the metric becomes totally useless due to systemic manipulation. The meta game shifts to hiding your manipulation of the metric while you manipulate the metric.). This system tends to produce generally poor results.
I wasn't trying to debate. I'm providing you a summary of what the general debate looks like after hundreds and hundreds of debates.
But let us take this post as a spring off point. You presume there is a baby. Both your posts illustrate this as an unquestioned axiom. However, I don't see a baby, it might well be a rat. It's down in the dirty water and I can't really identify it. The crux of the issue between us is then: 'Is there a baby, or something else?'. Which violates your axiom. Most people simply will not question their axioms. Which is when debate opponents start reaching for the, 'you're not qualified to have an opinion', 'your question is invalid', etc etc.
I'm not interested in debating the baby's potential eye color without first ascertaining the quality of the underpinnings of the system that declares a baby exists. I have found them to be rotten, mostly through smell as direct inspection is actively shunned. We don't really know it's actual state because academic science doesn't have systemic audits. The raw data, transforms and/or code/models are usually kept privately under tight wraps. This behavior is systemic. The generalized form of quality control in academic science is peer review, and my experience with quality systems is this is the bottom rung, the LOWEST form of quality check you can use that is actually a quality check.
If peer review is a good enough quality standard really depends on the product, customer, and the reputation my group desires to retain going forward. I think it's fine for low cost systems where schedule and budget are the customer's primary concerns. If something is of vital importance, I would demand higher levels of quality assurance than the lowest bar.
To sum up. If someone is declaring that there is an emergency. I consider this of vital importance! Thus, I find it perfectly reasonable to question the foundation until higher quality practices are in place to vet the entirety of the structure.
