The problem Climate Science seems to face is that it's become so wrapped up in politics. That is massively detrimental to any hope of progress or change because, well, politics has a tendency to be like that. We hear all sorts of utter crap spouted about it -- from both sides, I expect, if some of NJ's horror stories he's posted on this are even half true. Donald Trump full of some rubbish about how it was all invented by China (??), and then various developing countries staring daggers at the West for telling them "no, you can't build your growing economies on oil, sorry".
I can accept, anyway, that political arguments will interfere with any sort of change. I can also accept that it's frustrating to see that people are prepared, apparently, to exaggerate, massage figures, and perhaps even downright lie in order to push forward their suggestions for change. What I can't really accept is how some opponents and sceptics are busy rubbishing the science in some of the most facile ways possible. "The climate is controlled by nature", TTT's opening salvo, sold as if somehow it's a startling revelation that hasn't occurred to the hundreds and thousands of scientists who have made careers out of studying the subject, refining our understanding of how the world works along the way. It's just fundamentally awful to perpetuate basic ignorance, when by now the debate has long since moved on from "do humans affect the environment?" to "how much do we impact on things?", and "what are these effects likely to be in future?"
Returning to where I started, that Climate Science has become political also means that whenever the field changes, improving its predictions, revising or even discarding older interpretations, everyone notices in a way that just doesn't happen in most other scientific disciplines. God only knows what the public would think of, say, the various at times hilariously wrong predictions for something as basic as the mass of a particular particle called the top quark, expected to be something like 5 mass units at the beginning, then about 10 -- or maybe 20. No, 30. 50. 100?? Oh my god, it's about 170-odd. We got it wrong by a factor of well over 30. And there's worse than that in the field (there's one theoretical result that is so wrong it's worse even than trying to count how many atoms there are in the Universe and getting the answer 0, rather than about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
That rant over, the point is that I can get the hesitation with basing long-term public policy on a field that is still evolving. Perhaps the Climate lobby does need to adapt its rhetoric from "we're all gonna die!" to something closer to "we should take steps to minimise the risk that we might". On the other hand, would anyone listen to that either? Communicating science to a general audience is always difficult, and while I would never advocate lying, for something as serious as the risk of *** up the planet it doesn't seem unreasonable to stress the worst-case scenarios.