It isn't if you aren't a scientist in that field. As you're not qualified to do otherwise.

As a physicist in quantum sensing. I follow the science (opinion) of climate scientists as they're the experts of that field. And that opinion is constantly evolving, but I follow that.

Anything else is just being an armchair scientist.

That's called gatekeeping. Wonderful opinions can come for anyone.

A scientist is someone who found someone to pay them. Nothing more, nothing less.

Ignoring ideas unless they came from a brand is the opposite of science. Then you drop your brand (physicist) and expect others to judge your opinion as more important. It didn't work. As a senior physicist in quantum sensing I'm invalidating your brand.

Wonderful opinions can come from anyone.

Are these scientifically founded opinions. Not necessarily, hence why "following the science" is valid if you are following experts in their field.

If you're a software consultant, would you take on the opinions from a marketing client on the best algorithm to implement for their solution? Probably not.

If someone put in the effort and time to throughly research the topic and draw an opinion from that. Regardless of their title or their funding, then why would you discount it?

You would be silly not to take a better algorithm. It doesn't matter if it came from sales, a student or a homemaker.

If you can't judge something on it's merits and must rely on other signals then you end up judging the envelope and not the message.

If it was a better algorithm - then of couse. You wouldn't be a very good software engineer (or scientist) if you couldn't recognise that.

This has veered off from my original point. In that saying "follow the science" is not a issue - there is nothing wrong with following the opinion of experts in their field.

Surely a physicist is best placed to ‘Nullius in Verba’ and to do his own research. Climate models are fundamentally physical simulations after all…

Climate models are fundamentally physical, but I don't have the insight in the field to have the deep insight to make qualified opinions.

I could after significant research as suggested. But that is a significant endeavour, hence following the opinion of the field is typically sufficient.

It's like a fronted developer making comments on kernel development and vice versa. It's both fundamentally code, but different fields.

I think if you’ve looked at numerical models then you have enough knowledge to at least judge the underlying assumptions: boundary conditions, numerical stability, discretisation methods, validation methods and results.

In the same way that I can verify a SAT solution, I don’t need to know how to code a sat solver.

Unfortunately there are fundamental disagreements about most of the critical parts of climate science, so going by the opinion of the field isn’t foolproof (who to choose? How to choose?). Many fields have had false consensus beliefs before, and most of their problems weren’t 1000th the difficulty of climate modelling.

Everything is fundamentally physics.

Biological systems play a huge role in the climate too so its not purely physical simulation.

This is true, but there are no biological simulations in the mainstream models, just various correction factors with their own uncertainty. I wish they had biological data because then we would have more domains in which to measure their accuracy.

What none!?

This has been a long standing criticism of climate change models and I had expected it to be a major focus of research.

No. Why?

Because science just updates our beliefs, it doesn’t produce ‘truths’ that we can follow. See the Problem of Induction or the Duhem–Quine thesis.

What do you think truth is other than confident beliefs?

Nothing can produce "truths". If you want absolute truths, pick a holy text and decide for yourself what absolute truth you can pin on it.

You summarised my point nicely.

What we call ‘truth’ is just the beliefs we think are most accurate. ‘Just follow the science’ is silly because it essentially means following beliefs on faith without questioning whether they are the best theory. In many cases the better theory goes against the consensus.

E.g. mothers who ‘just followed the science’ and took Thalidomide caused their children untold suffering. They could have been skeptical but instead they had faith in science, which was unfortunately done badly.

It’s a process not an end state.

“Follow science” and ‘follow “the” science’ are two different things, and we just need to go back in history to understand that humans did some horrible stuff because of “the” science.

Hm.. I don’t see that distinction in this case.

To me when they say they “follow the science” it does not imply an end state. To me it only implies “everything we know so far”.

I am sure that if scientific results showed the opposite of their current idea, they would once again update their view.

Your intuition of scientists updating views is wrong, see Kuhns scientific revolutions for more examples. Scientists generally stick to preconceived notions long after there is data to refute them.

E.g. heliocentrism, germ theory, cigarettes being unhealthy, lobotomies being optimal