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.
replyOnce 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.
replyCan ordinary civilians feasibly measure, for example, global trends in mean temperature without relying on the data of others?
replyNo, 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.
replyIf 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.
Are you going to build a competitor to CERN?
replyThere are many things that cannot be feasibly verified empirically without access to rare resources.
I think it's difficult to relay to the public that a lot of this noise in "scientific publications" is not the same category as real research by reputable institutions. Yes, in certain cases the line can be blurry, fraudsters are sometimes caught in big-name institutions, maybe more in some fields than others, but serious researchers of the field know very well which publication venues and research groups are the real deal and what is bullshit. Overwhelmingly, these fraud papers and nonsense LLM-generated fake stuff are not published in serious journals or conferences.
replyIt's a bit like how can we trust online shopping if I get all these emails trying to sell me aphrodisiac pills?