@dwinblood you are in danger of being hailed as a alien. You need to stop making to much sense. LOL
Science was actually high jacked by a philosophy religions at leas 100 years ago. Changes in the text books where purposefully made to obfuscate science. A good example is the second law of thermal dynamics has an enclosed system definition that doesn't actually exist in reality. Today however great emphasis is placed on this definition so we can have fairy land hypothesis called the theory of (you name it).
I know longer trust the funny letters in front of peoples names. To me those funny letters are the clue, that a clueless is now center stage. I know longer trust technical almanacs or directories of data for the same reason. It is easy to pay someone to write what ever story you want. Scientist must after all put food on the table. Just like the sanitation engineer or the ditch digger.
The greatest tool for science is in between our ears. Putting that in the mind grinder's we like to label our institution of higher learning is proof that what is in between the ears isn't science able.
Agree with you, like the theory of dark matter or energy...
It is fine to hypothesize/speculate such topics. The problem is they move them to the state of "theory" which in the scientific method should never occur without experimentation and observation.
It is important to realize that "Theoretical X" where X is some scientific field usually implies people are trying to come up with ideas that can explain oddities we observe in X that we can't quite prove. So they are really just hypothesis/speculations that seem like they COULD prove something if we could measure them.
They still have value. The problem is that people treat them as truth, when really all they are is a guess that might be true, or have elements of truth.
Agreed @dwinblood. But one could argue that it is all "Theoretical X". At any point in time (or understanding) a problem is only explained by the person trying to define it to an extent that there are no more questions that can be asked by the person asking questions. Hence my reference to dark energy and matter (or shall we call it fudge factors to make the math work).
What do we really know?
Agree with your conclusion on climate change.
I am young compared to most talking on this subject and I have actually started despising the words science and scientist. Not for what you know it to mean but for what I have realized it has become. It should be a search for answers not profits. We are very far off course.