Thank you for the reasonable discussion.

To clarify, there's no need to tip-toe around politely. I am absolutely asserting a conspiracy! This assertion is on strong ground because academics get caught so frequently putting in writing that they're engaged in a conspiracy to pervert peer review. I'm not sure whether this is stupidity (hopefully) or cynical awareness that they can get away with anything and it won't matter (more likely). We already mentioned the famous ClimateGate email where a CRU member said specifically he'd keep skeptical papers out "even if I have to redefine what peer review means to do it", but then there's also incidents like this one, where an invited IPCC reviewer was blocked specifically because he was trying to actually review papers carefully and was asking for data i.e. wasn't one of "the team", as climatologists like to call it.

https://climateaudit.org/2007/03/28/accessing-hegerl-data/

I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.

Go read the whole article, it's extremely damaging to the credibility of the IPCC. This stuff is no surprise because "The idea that all climatologists are financially and professionally incentivized to uphold a false narrative is not just cynical", it's also true. The idea that scientists celebrate and pop the bubbly when they get proven wrong is academic propaganda. Yes, if the overturning of a paradigm isn't too embarrassing to the old guard and creates lots of new potential papers for the next generation then they'll get over it and get on with it (ex. quantum physics). But far more common is an overturning that goes like this:

1. All your answers are based on a shoddy pseudo-scientific paradigm and should be retracted.

2. But we don't know the answers either, so there is no new paradigm.

In other words, science is invalidated but there's no new direction to go in that lets something be salvaged from the ruins. Academia very visibly cannot handle this. Nor will it ever be able to handle this, it's inherent to the incentive structure. The signatories to this declaration are outsiders, so what climatologists do next when their paradigm is overturned just isn't their problem. They don't care, all they care about is that science as a whole isn't seen to be exaggerating or lying. But climatologists very much do care because if their current paradigm is overturned then they have nowhere to go, no new paradigm to reorient around. Their careers would lie in ruins with no way to rebuild. So, they fight.

This dynamic exists in all fields of course which is one of the root causes of the replication crisis. It's why it's called a "crisis" even by academic insiders, not just annoying online critics. Sure, if papers were being routinely replicated as part of the normal scientific process, and sure, if replication failure was rare, then your argument would hold water. But neither of those is correct: replication efforts are unusual one off events, and the failure rate is so high that just assuming everything said by these fields is wrong would be a perfectly rational reaction. That's clearly not normal or an intended part of the process. Moreover many papers fail to replicate for highly suspicious reasons indicative of fraud.

Climatology is in an even worse state: it's one of those fields that just systematically rejects the whole idea that its work should be replicable! Consider these two links:

1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=glob...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

The first link yields about 50,000 results for me, most of them papers discussing the long pause or haitus in global warming that kicked off the millenium. That's a lot of papers! The second link is where the climatologists who maintain the historical temperature databases decided that no such pause ever happened, it was all just measurement error. They release a new version of history and at a stroke, all those papers are now non-replicable! So they retracted all 50,000 papers that were built on bad data right? Ha ... ha ... <gasp> ... <splutter> ... ha. No. Climatologists pull this kind of stunt because they've done so before and got away with it. Go read any of the papers that deal with global cooling before 1975 or so. They will discuss the long term cooling trend in the 20th century and present graphs of temperatures going down. Now go check those same graphs today and no cooling is visible. Again, climatologists decided their data had been bad and rewrote it from scratch (N.B. this is considered fraud in other fields). Again, none of those papers were ever retracted.

What do you even do with a field that routinely invalidates whole decades of its own research, making their findings totally non-replicable unless you somehow find old copies of temperature datasets, and does so with no retractions at all? Real scientists reject it!