[Clanan]

I don't think this is good advice. An amateur investigation of a complex topic is probably worse than trusting an expert who may or may not be trustworthy. You don't know what you don't know. Sure, you grabbed (what you think is) raw data. But what if the trend or timescale was too small? What if you asked the wrong question? What if the data was artificially adjusted, or should have been but wasn't? (As NOAA has been caught doing.) You don't know these things, i.e. what is/isn't important. Now you're certain of your results, which may be completely wrong. To me, this is the SV/nerd version of an uninformed ideologue. ("Research fast and break things!") Maybe it's better to expend that effort identifying whether your go-to experts are really trustworthy, instead.