Politicizing it has almost nothing to do with whether or not it is believed, it is politicized when it has value on a political scale. Saying Country A has lower impact on the climate than Country B and therefore A should limit its production of weapons and infrastructure that rely on factories and industries that produce harmful chemicals is very obviously of value to a politician
> Imagine if scientists just "believed" science and never tried to reproduce.
You're mixing up scientists-as-individuals with scientists-as-a-whole.
Scientists-as-a-whole should certainly reproduce results, both to check new claims, and to teach/learn/demonstrate old knowledge.
Scientists-as-individuals need belief, since there's no way to indivudally reproduce everything. For example, climate models rely on decades of measurements from Earth-observation satellites; if scientist shouldn't "believe", how would they go about reproducing those measurements for themselves?
Even if individual climate scientists began each of their projects by building and launching their own satellites to take decades of observations (which would lag behind existing data, in any case), how would they calibrate the instruments on those satellites (e.g. without "believing" in the zeroth law of thermodynamics)?
In principle, every individual could spend 10 years to learn the subject, then comb trough the evidence in one particular detail. That's not possible in reality.
Even climate scientists have to trust other climate scientists in details they are not experts in. Climate chemist has not checked 3D computational model and vice versa.
It is said that Thomas Young (1773 – 1829) was the last man who knew everything. He was a polymath who had studied most of human knowledge in detail.
Isn’t that the problem? Because for most people, believing in it is the only option? They don’t have the tools or the ability to either refute nor confirm it.
No, verification is not belief. You can believe in the methodologies I suppose, but that is not what is being said when people say "believe in science". They are saying "believe in the findings from people you haven't met who have credentials", which is nothing more than a nonsense appeal to authority.
If a subject is important to someone, they should try their best to understand the research and to more fully understand a claim, one would do well to research with a heavy dose of skepticism in everything, especially things that affirm their own bias.
No, Gore merely made a movie that a lot of people saw, the politicisation (in the sense of wilfully ignoring science results for partisan reasons) was started in the 1990's by oil companies and republicans looking to kill they Kyoto protocol.
You can say so only if you believe that reality is constructed, like some French postmodernist philosophers do.
If you think there is some ground truth in hard sciences, and science community provides best approximation of it, then "other side too" argument is not valid. Al Gore educated, only climate dentists politicized.
Is a climate dentist (a) a typo (i.e., you meant denialist); (b) a clever reference to Seinfeld and anti-dentites; or (c) a valid phrase that I’m unfamiliar with?
ps. Climate science is political only because those who don't believe in science politicize it.