The believe-in vs factual-acknowledgment dichotomy doesn’t seem so mysterious to me, and I think it undergirds this entire mess. In lay discussions, the two are customarily conflated; probably that is the source of the illusion of mystery. And alas, said mystifying conflation follows the (unscientific) lead of the more hysterically-minded among those who fancy themselves to be communicators of “science”. Doubly alas, it aligns perfectly with the mass-media policy of turning every conceivable report into a screeching headline (a.k.a. yellow journalism after a paper once printed on that color) – or, more aptly nowadays, into content-free clickbait.
The believe-in branch – a.k.a. “culture” – has become inextricably entwined with the meme that “we” (often everyone but the speaker, who will continue indefinitely to consume vast quantities of jet fuel to frivolously and unnecessarily transport his or her physical body to “conferences”) “must” immediately rush into rash, radical, impoverishing “action” (such as forgoing travel, living in unhealthy freezing or sauna-hot spaces, self-imprisoning within walking or at best cycling radius, forgoing the evil “carbon footprint” food du jour, etc.) lest the world come to a crashing end (oh, the horror, some utter fools who bought Florida swampland will eventually find it wetter than before.) So when one says one “believes in”, one is likely to be heard as endorsing that “must” unequivocally and unboundedly.
But alas yet again, science simply has nothing whatsoever to tell us about that “must”. It can only tell us the tradeoff between using X amount of fossil fuels for the sake of Y socioeconomic benefit – and not even that until it develops to where the model projections aren’t all over the map. But whether to accept or reject said tradeoff itself, with its (now extreme) uncertainties, is entirely a matter of value judgment. It turns on culture and idiosyncratic personal preference (for example quasi-worship of “species”); not in any way whatever on science. Thus it should come as no surprise at all that science seems largely ineffectual as a club to bash the political arguments into submission.
That is, when all is said and done, science is utterly silent on “ought”/”must” questions. Such questions clearly include such weighty matters as, hypothetically, whether the societal “we” ought to impoverish ourselves to “preserve” a strain of temperature-fragile earwigs that happens to bear pincers 200 microns longer than the rest.
Simply see the conflation of science and the “must” for what it is, and the political mysteries vanish. The political conflicts over “action” are of course unresolvable and thus remain.
