"Scientists look for inconsistencies and potential flaws, and try to understand how significant they are, if they can be controlled for or if they completely invalidate the research they're reviewing"

That's giving academics a bit more credit than they deserve. This is a theoretical idea of how they should operate, rather than what they actually do.

The problem of urban heat distorting weather station readings over time is very real. It has affected the US weather station network in the past. The problems were completely ignored for decades until climate "denialists" (actually: people outside academia who care about science) physically visited many of the stations, took photos and then wrote a big report which caught the attention of Republicans in Congress. They documented thermometers that had once been in open fields but were now next to air conditioner exhausts, transformers, mobile phone towers, main roads etc. An especially big problem is weather stations that were once in farmland and are now at airports, the biggest heat sources you can imagine! In fact over time there has been a lot of dropout of stations and now many of the remaining stations that report reliably are sited at airports.

They also did some work where they found stations that were still properly sited (the US has far more weather stations than needed, so this was possible), and looked at what happened when you used readings only from them. A huge amount of the warming trend simply vanished.

In the wake of that a couple of things happened:

1. Some of the stations the report highlighted were shut down.

2. Congress can't agree on much but, spending money is an exception. They funded a brand new weather station network with ideal siting, the latest sensors etc. Really state of the art, and so well done that even the non-academics who wrote the "denialist" report were satisfied with it. This is called the US Climate Reference Network (CRN).

So, happy ending right? Unfortunately no. There are several problems that persist:

1. The US CRN output isn't actually used by climate researchers. Instead they have kept on using the old broken network which they now adjust via models to, they claim, fix the problems. This is problematic because these are the very same people who blatantly ignored their own severe data quality issues for decades until bloggers noticed what was happening.

2. The old network was never actually fixed; the government just shut down the bad stations that were highlighted in the original report. This year the people who did that original report did another one where they once again visited weather stations, and they found that basically none of them were in compliance with the siting rules (which are objective, this isn't a matter of opinion). In other words, the claims that standards were raised were deceptive, some rules were written down but aren't being enforced.

3. The US CRN shows no warming trend whatsoever. This is for the entire USA since 2005. This data appears on its face to be incompatible with the claims of runaway warming and an impending crisis/emergency.

Take a look and see for yourself. Go here:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/national-tempera...

and then change the graph to plot "all months" and unselect nClimDiv leaving CRN. You'll see that the temperature trend is flat.

"A more mainstream sort of climate change denial you will see is right-wing news outlets saying something along the lines of "it is snowing, so much for global warming" during a snowstorm."

I think you've been left behind by recent changes. Attributing single weather events to climate change in either direction is indeed not supposed to be valid, but the new field of "attribution studies" does exactly that by claiming that individual events can be directly connected to climate change. The rules changed and now saying e.g. "it is snowing, that's evidence of climate change" is not only not right wing denial, it's now considered denial to object to such claims!

We're constantly being asked to trust that scientists of all stripes are trustworthy, honest, and behave as model scientists should. But when people dig into the details they constantly find non-optimal behavior along with a culture that doesn't seem to care. That's the source of the replication crisis, the source of constantly shifting claims about COVID, etc. Trust is easy to lose: when people notice that scientists aren't holding themselves to the highest standards, but demand us to act as if they do, how is trust restored?