It's certainly softer science than 1900s physics. There are a few big science-related questions that require practical approaches to that aren't 100% black and white. So consensus has to allow for a few more outlier positions than usual.

Interestingly, climate change and Chernobyl health effects have a lot of parallels. They've both been broadly studied by various teams of scientists. Society has turned to using large internationally-respected UN and WHO-organized group of experts to deal with the these kinds of questions. For Chernobyl, this group is called UNSCEAR [1]. For climate change it's called the IPCC [2].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html [2] https://www.ipcc.ch/

In both Chernobyl and Climate change, there are people who passionately disagree with the international UN teams of scientists. In climate change, we call them climate-change deniers. In Chernobyl, we call them Greenpeace. In the name of the scientific method, it's worth listening to what these people have to say and testing some hypotheses. If the hypotheses turn out to be hard to support, we begin to move on with a mainstream consensus.

The odd thing is that these groups of people (climate change deniers and Greenpeace) have very little else in common.