That’s the beautiful thing about science: You do not have to (and should not) trust any individual. And even if you don’t trust “the consensus” of “the scientific community”, you can empirically verify yourself.

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tbrownaw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Once you move from abstract to practical - like say having legislators or regulators make rules based on The Science, or relying personally on more facts than you have time to independently verify - yes you do need to have trustworthy people.

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zahlman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can ordinary civilians feasibly measure, for example, global trends in mean temperature without relying on the data of others?

	▲	fc417fc802 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, but the literature is open for you to read. Thus you can judge the stated reasoning for yourself. You can also assess how many independent groups are making the same (or closely related) claim. If only one person claims X then it might be fraud. If large numbers of seemingly unrelated people all claim X then you're forced to decide between X and a global conspiracy to misrepresent X. To your example. Importantly, even if you deemed one of the global mean temperature datasets to be untrustworthy there are other related (but different) datasets. There are also other pieces of evidence related to the downstream claims that don't look directly at temperature.

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dekhn 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Are you going to build a competitor to CERN?

There are many things that cannot be feasibly verified empirically without access to rare resources.