> Because the public doesn't want to be told they have to make their lives slightly worse.

Especially right now when everything seems to already be declining.

Theoretically speaking, yes. But practically science is very interested with good and bad, because the goal of science is to bring as much good and to avert as many bad as possible. There is abstract science, there is fundamental science, which are studying things far from our everyday concerns, but even they are not free from "good and bad": ITER has all its funding, because we believe that fusion can bring a lot of good to us. Scientists cannot just forget where the money came from, and what the goal was attached to them.

But when we speak about climate science, or something else "close to Earth", then it is impossible to imagine how they may not be concerned with good and bad.

Theoretically speaking, science is looking for a truth, and any truth, but practically it seeks useful knowledge, and if you look into any scientific article, it starts with an argument that the results presented in the article are useful, and not just the authors of the article think so, but there are (were) other people too. Undergraduates are explicitly taught to write articles like that.

This has serious “your dad and I are for the jobs the comet will provide” energy.

Sometimes, the outcome of a scenario will be unambiguously tragic for humanity. The collapse of the AMOC would be one such event.

> Science seeks to understand what is, not how you might feel about it. It is interesting that things went there.

No, it's not interesting at all: the clamouring for climate scientists to not use words like "bad" about increased severity and frequency of forest fires, flash floods, droughts, etc is just the expected outcome of boring old corruption. There's really no other reason for someone to object to calling tornadoes "bad" than them or theirs getting paid to say it.

So medicine is not a science because it's concerned with what's "good" and what's "bad" for someone's health? I find this kind of argument principally flawed.

Many sciences are concerned with the consequences of human actions and it's hard if not impossible to describe these in meaningful ways without applying some criteria for what outcomes are good (desirable, positively evaluated) and what outcomes are bad (not desirable, negatively evaluated).

Besides, there is a whole area of science that maybe is more like engineering but is clearly worthwhile, too, even if it's not strictly a natural science only. For example, urban planning might not be a science in the strict sense but it's clearly important and involves scientific studies.

If policy makers can't get from climate scientist's an evaluation of the potential consequences of climate changes, then who else would produce these for them? Should they just make it up on the fly?

“Good” or “bad” is not contrary to science. For example scientists will evaluate the risks vs. benefits of a cancer treatment to determine if the benefits are worth the risk. They will do the same for vaccine efficacy etc.

Scientists are also humans with their own value judgment which is sometimes very flawed (see e.g. Richard Lynn and his race science) and sometimes with revolutionary insights that expands our shared empathy for the world around us (see e.g. Jane Godall).

Often when I hear a statement like this I see it as a thought terminating cliché. The value judgement of a scientists is often disregarded only when it is contrary (or inconvenient) to the speaker’s argument.