It's not helpful when scientists share their views outside their specialty and get things wrong. As much as I appreciate and respect Freeman Dyson, I wish he would have kept his views to himself on this particular issue, as he was remarkably ill-informed and stubbornly so. But that said, there's a difference between sharing your view and going on a crusade, which he didn't really seem to do. Now, if he had gone on a crusade, that'd be a different matter.
If you have a group of people with Sacred Knowledge™ who are the only capable of judging on things and you have to literally believe them (and dare you not!) as their proofs lie in the realm of sketchy models in which they ignore billions of variable, it's not science, it's at least scientism. But there is more. They have a whole set of signs of a pseudo-religion. Their own Original Sin, apocalypse, Messiah.
Judging by the consequences for those public figures who made a mistake of doubting these believes, it's a whole totalitarian sect.
Except these people (Scientists(tm)) have to show their work and anyone can follow along and participate, provided they aren't so afraid of their own ignorance and terrified of feeling stupid that they strike out with disbelief and denial.
Sure, scientists make mistakes. Their models need adjustment. They ignore variables because they don't have the computational power to model every electron in the universe. Yeah, imprecise models make imprecise predictions. No one has accuracy of 100%. Sometimes it's 90%, sometimes it's 50%. Sometimes it's 99.9%. It's rarely, rarely ever 0%. People just don't publish scientific results that are 100% wrong with no checking whatsoever.
But that's not the level of conversation we are having. We usually aren't talking about adjusting and tinkering or adding sub-models for systems that aren't fully understood yet. We aren't asking what we missed, we aren't examining the assumptions from the outset, trying to get to something that works. We aren't talking details of climate models or pointing to something in the inner guts of their computer simulations that we can fix up, remove, replace, etc. All of that is really complicated and hard! And we aren't doing that specifically because you frame that stuff as "Sacred Knowledge" which you reflexively and categorically reject--it's a shortcut thinking that doesn't require you to understand math, code, or read a goddamn paper. It's a shortcut that allows you to keep reasoning in a vacuum and go about your daily life because you actually hate the idea of being an (xyz) scientist.
As such, we end up in a situation where you are forced to argue a position that results from all-or-nothing thinking, and have to start accusing them of being a religion, a totalitarian sect, usually because one of them got pissed off at some really outrageously stupid disinformation spread deliberately by politicians. But you are forced there because you either can't or don't want to cede any rhetorical ground of being fully and utterly more right than "they" are, because you have no idea what will happen if you cede any ground at all. So instead the othering intensifies. Reject everything they say! We must throw them out! It's a religion! Look, one of them got pissed off one day! They were wrong that one time! I don't trust a word they say!
And you only frame things this way because that's how you think--in terms of religion and power. Moreover, it's how you think they think.
No. I absolutely and unequivocally reject the framing of your comment. It's lazy and it's a lie.
There is no "Sacred Knowledge." Go dig. Scientists welcome it. But don't be a denialist moron. There are too many of those. Denialist morons reject even the basics of what scientists do. Sometimes they couch it in more-scientific-than-thou-art framing like yours, sometimes they don't. But they come out in anger and denial. You know what? That pisses off anybody. To have your work shat on, you better believe that pisses people off. We end up circling back over and over and over again to the same basics and it's just exhausting, because people aren't motivated by a desire for the truth, they are motivated by their tribal instincts which underpin your framing, whether you recognize it or not.
Ars Technica has an article about Mr. Dyson and in the comments, the author attempts to explain why Dyson might have had the view on climate science that he had. I found the suggested reasons plausible.