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Claims that the "the science isn't settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
[...] Those who demand the science be "settled" before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.
One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement "X causes Y" is naive.
Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Friday September 16 2016, @04:53PM
The scientific method is general enough that it fits an astonishing number of different specialties.
You'll generally start making observations, but that's not technically required. You form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis and if the results of the experiment confirm the hypothesis you'll generally mark it as such and write your paper. At that point, the paper generally gets peer reviewed for flaws and published. At that point, you'll generally have other scientists perform the same experiment under the same conditions to try and replicate the results.
Once there's been a number of different and related hypotheses tested, those will usually result in some sort of a theory that describes a set of situations in a more general way and itself is used to make further predictions and generate new hypotheses.
Laws are where things break down a bit as there doesn't seem to be as much agreement about what laws are and should be. They generally wind up being relatively narrow in focus, but there's some disagreement as to whether that's just because we know so little or because that's what a law is.
If you're not doing something that approximates that, then it's questionable whether or not you can or should refer to that as science. That's been the way things have been done for quite some time and it tends to work quite well. Fields that slip away from that tend to wind up with results that aren't reliable.
Most of the actual variance involved between specialties isn't at that level, it's about what level of certainty you need to call something settled and what rules you're expected to adhere to when it comes to actually performing the experiments.