This sounds like a good opportunity for an experiment. We should get some trillion-dollar industry to take up a campaign against, say, polymer chemistry, or mycology. Do you think we could get people to claim that plastics and mushrooms are a hoax in three or four decades?

As we should. Climate scientists consistently underestimate the impact and speed of climate change.

It's funny how the measured mass of the electron being revised monotonically upward is literally Feynman's textbook example to a priori detect fudged scientific data[1], but when we see climate impacts continually revised upward—decade after decade—we just smile and nod.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...