I would agree with that. It's an extremely rare science that has only 2 sides. Real science should be seen as a bunch of teenagers arguing about the best superhero, only with lots of data and formulas and the like. Convincing someone of some theory's truth does not happen more than once a year at most universities (except maybe with grad students). And there is money involved in that convincing, make no mistake about that. There has to be. And of course, the discussions last for centuries.

Climate science has lots of sides in reality. There are many, many problems and the only thing that's really quite agreed upon is that we've had warming for 150 years. Yes that it's has something to do with increased levels of co2 is pretty agreed upon, but not what caused what, for example, or how much of a feedback loop it is (see further on).

Keep in mind what climate science is. Essentially it's a very, very new kind of science. We are measuring reality, using statistical "best fit" rules, and assuming they represent natural laws that will continue in perpetuity. And then, of course, mix that in with what we know to be true (e.g. locality of changes), until you arrive at something that vaguely looks like reality.

And like any science "the consensus" is "whatever works". Now keep in mind that this is not necessary works in the traditional sense. It is that, but there is some truth to the fact that climate science is getting a lot of funding within academia (one part of it is, as usual, and it's not the part improving the statistical methods)

But of course, there's lots of problems here

1) is this approach valid at all ? Getting statistical approximations of laws and treating them as holy cows ... (e.g. one could make the observation that the IPCC ARs, as far as we know, are wrong. If you go back to 1990, take AR0's "95%" values for global temperature for their best fit ... well, we're outside of that range. Same for AR1 and AR2 and pretty close to the edge for AR3, so it's not like there are no reasons to question the whole thing).

2) does statistics apply to climate variables at all ? Specifically temperature is a big problem here. (Statistics cannot be -correctly- applied to variables that don't follow the central limit theorem. Correctly is in there because most of statistics can be blindly applied to any time series, it just doesn't predict anything. There is the small issue that there was some historical work stating that statistics won't work on climate, and nobody's bothered to revisit that. Temperature is gasses does not follow the central limit theorem, so measuring the "average" temperature of a gas is not possible in the general case).

3) Even if this approach works, it doesn't predict stuff it hasn't seen before, because of how it works. This is not science that's coming from first principles (and even that has limits to how far it applies, e.g. extreme cold or heat). But climate science is worse than other sciences where this is done because the theory is really only based on the values seen. The problem here is what consists of a "new" situation ?

If temperature were to determine what is "normal" then we've been in a new situation at least a few weeks on a yearly basis for 150 years now. And likely there is some point where it really will be a new situation.

There are known problems with this approach as well, like it is considered "normal" that this theory, being based on 150 years of data, predicts unbounded warming. Given the method, I agree that this is normal, but it's also obviously wrong. No matter how far in the future, climate is never going to warm to 1000000 degrees surface temperature, even though the climate models do predict that will happen. A learned rule that has been "trained" on only-ever-warming climate keeps going up.

4) And of course, the popular explanations for climate change are wrong. Climate science DOES NOT claim that increasing CO2 exhaust will cause the athmosphere to heat, well it does, but that part is not having much effect at all.

What it really predicts is that a little bit of warming will cause more warming. E.g. little warming -> more water vapour -> more athmosphere insulation -> a little more warming. Feedback loop. Now repeat for water, methane, co2 itself (non-human co2), co, ... That, not human co2 exhaust, is what is claimed to be causing global warming.

What I also don't understand is how climate agreements are considered reasonable. Lowering co2 output will only slow down the warming, it won't stop it even if humans stopped co2 output entirely. Which brings the question : what do all these climate accords achieve ? They achieve nothing, even if they somehow magically start working. A delay of a decade at best, maybe two or three if you're wildly optimistic.

It may mean that cooling will work similarly (yes the theory does not predict cooling ever, but any sane human being knows perfectly well that the planet will cool again no matter what we de, look at the 1 million year temperature graph if you're not convinced). If it works like the warming did, then once it starts cooling a little bit (like 0.1 degrees should easily do it), that by itself will cause more cooling. So the graph will reverse at some point, and the reverse, the temperature drop, should be as unstoppable as warming has been.

5) Now the kicker is when will this reversal happen ? Historically it has been up to ~3 degrees warmer than it currently is, and then we consistently saw rapid declines of about 10 degrees ("rapid" meaning a millenium or so, but with most cooling happening in 2-3 centuries). This has happened dozens of times in the past. Problem is, we don't know what causes it. For a few cases we can point out simple things that change at the hinge point, but they never explain a 10 degree drop.

It is pretty unique that we have had a temperature rise at anything but the very last years of an interglacial. Usually when the temperature was warmer than it is now, it shot up to warmer than it is now at the end of an ice age, and then stayed high for millenia, to suddenly drop again.

But we are at the end of an interglacial. An ice age is "about" to start (again look at the 1 million year temperature graph). Now when will that happen ? Well, somewhere in the next few thousand years would expected. But if you did what climate science does, you take historical lengths of interglacials and create a 95% confidence interval, we're already in that interval (though early times, not yet at the mean, the mean is about 280 years in the future, with a standard deviation of a little over 3 centuries. But there certainly have been interglacials shorter than the current one, meaning there would be nothing remarkable in the graph if it started today).