[oldandtired]

Maybe, you can look at the evidence presented and determine for yourself what conclusions you come to. It may be that you will determine that the evidence is for anthropogenic climate change. But then again, you might determine that the evidence is for natural processes and that anthropogenic climate change is extremely minor.

It's up to you to decide how and what you will believe.

[Afterthought edit]. Many years ago, I was given the following advice:

Surround yourself with experts, but make your own decisions as you see fit. Experts are just that, specialists in a narrow field and they do not see the bigger picture. It is up to you to do that for yourself.

[adrianN]

Maybe you don't have time to study a subject for 5+ years fulltime to become sufficiently qualified to read scientific papers and assess their results.

[oldandtired]

The whole point is that you don't need to study a subject for 5+ years fulltime to become sufficiently qualified to read scientific papers and assess their results.

You just have to have enough interest to look at the data and see if it matches the conclusions reached based on the fundamentals of the theories involved.

If you reading and interest is extensive enough, you can pick up a lot of information that will help you do this.

I am not an organic chemist, but I have enough knowledge of the subject to understand if there is hand waving or actual evidence for the conclusions. This really only involves what I initially learned at school and university and what I have picked up in the intervening decades.

[yters]

What if scientists regularly engage in falsifying and otherwise manipulating their results to fit their agenda? What if the very statistical methodology they follow is open to abuse? If we are to give wholesale acceptance to anyone who is an 'official scientist,' yet they could well be corrupt, how is that epistemically responsible?

Furthermore, why must we blindly accept the status quo when there are legitimate dissenters? The very nature of scientific advance is that it overturns the status quo. Your methodology would seem to undermine scientific progress.

Finally, it is said that the mark of a true expert is the ability to boil a complex subject down to the lay level. If the layman must study fulltime for 5+ years to understand climate science results, is the field perhaps not at the necessary level of expertise?

[bigbugbag]

No need to resort to FUD, the thing you are mentioning happen and we can look at them. One such high profile example is Andrew Wakefield study published in the lancet which is the starting point for the "vaccines cause autism" controversy.

What happened is the author got caught, found guilty of professional misconduct and removed from practicing medicine while the paper was retracted. But this had consequences as a growing and vocal fringe population used this to fuel their agenda and spread misinformation against vaccines playing a role in the resurgence of contagious diseases.

But your arguing about climate change makes no sense, climate change has been happening for a while now there's no denying it field measure all points to this; sea level rises gradually, ice cap disappear, athmosphere composition changes, mass extinction of species is happening, natural disasters are increasing, etc. Instead of wasting everybody's time on minute details and discussing attribution you should focus on what can be done to minimize the consequences.

[yters]

But what are these huge consequences people are alarmed about? A very slow increase in sea level rise over 100 years can easily be addressed. Warmer climates will mean more vegetation and a more habitable planet. Why is not more attention focused on the benefits?

[oldandtired]

We have enough evidence of cooking the books in lots of different fields. Retraction Watch is a good site to see this.

The problem today is that there is no encouragement to investigate ideas that are different to the accepted models. Nor are this encouragement to do full scale duplications of reported results. Anomalies are only investigated if they don't appear to dispute the current consensus.

I had a recent discussion with a nuclear physicist that I admire about this and his response was to the effect that he would discourage such experiments. There was a lot more in the discussion which is not relevant here.

What we must be careful of is blindly assuming that our theories and models are correct. We have to realise that our interpretations of the results are many times based on deeply held beliefs that are not provable but are assumed to be true.