> 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)?
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)?