The one necessary thing about science, and especially science in a subject that has been highly politicized and deeply subjected to real world policy initiatives that could affect the lives of billion of people is room for debate and opinion.

Yes, some of that opinion will be ignorant, foolish or based on willful lies and conspiracy theories, but much of it won't be. In either case, even the more radical opinions deserve the right to be spoken because they also allow useful debate to slowly evolve. the contrary of this is repressing all but "correct" points of view in a way that also suffocates controversial but intelligent disagreements. The COVID pandemic and its still highly debated science and politics have if anything demonstrated the importance of this even more. (Lab leak theories anyone? Or how about the debate over mask use?).

This is all to say that while many denialist points of view about climate change are flatly absurd, there are many others that are also much more nuanced and worthy of entertaining. I personally don't deny that we're changing the world's climate, and that this could have catastrophic consequences down the road. However, what I also accept as possible is that for one thing, politicians will absolutely take advantage of a dramatic scientific topic to hijack its vagaries in favor of their own agendas. Also that scientists are just as fallible and subject to prestige-seeking and ideological bias as anyone else with an opportunity for self-gratification, and that the mix of both of the above can easily lead to certain still ambiguous topics being pushed forward as concrete absolutisms for the sake of specific motives that are less altruistic than they seem at first glance. Will anyone deny that these characteristics are unlikely or impossible?

Then of course there are the ideological fixations around proposed solutions too, such as the absolutely anti-nuclear stances of a large number of those who also claim that climate change should be battled. Are they really open to all scientifically/technically valid remedies, or are they selectively choosing those that fit their very personal political dogmas?

As for the science itself, I don't know nearly enough about it to claim any expertise, but from everything I have read, it seems extremely dubious to think that the climate isn't being changed by human activity, generally in the direction of a warming trend. However, to what extent this will devastate us down the road, or to what extent we'll be able to counteract it with policies, technologies and social/economic tendencies that we today in 2021 might not even yet be conscious of is something nobody can claim to be certain of.

This doesn't mean that concrete safety measures shouldn't be promoted now, based on what we do know, but it also doesn't negate open debate or acknowledging that emotional reasoning also exists among people who fervently believe in inescapable catastrophe over the next few decades of climate change. These people might be wrong, and they certainly can't say with absolute certainty that they're completely correct. Right here on HN i've seen comments that practically go into hysterics about how we're already fucked and that our future is deeply grim because of our climate actions. Can anybody seriously say that they're reasoning soberly and with all the known science on their side? I don't think so.

If I were to bet on anything, it's that the world one century from now will be so different from what we know today in so many ways that few of our modern fears, even about climate change, can be considered settled. I'd also bet that by then we will have arrived at solutions to this global climate problem that many of the more extreme fears present today aren't even considering or aware of at all. Consider the major specific extrapolations of thinkers, politicians, scientists and many among the public and media in the year 1900. How many of them have more than minor relevance today? We're no less excempt from such blind spots than they were back then.