I think they know perfectly well how it works - and that like everything else it’s been corrupted by politics and money. Arguably the only fields of science free from this corruption are physics and chemistry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong about that.
The blinders came off when the majority of people finally saw that you could pay doctors and university researchers -- two of the most respected types of people in the post-war world -- to produce "studies" to show that, say, smoking was GOOD for you, against all data on the subject.
I'm 50. I can't tell you how many headlines I've read over my adult life that flip-flop between eggs being good for you, versus that they're killing you.
In my 4th-grade science textbook, I was told that we were entering a new mini ice age, and that we'd be completely out of oil by the year 2000. (Which kind of sucked, because I was going to be driving by then.)
We all know where the climate thing is now, and I don't hear ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any more.
THIS is precisely why it's so hard to sell the public on the dangers of climate change. The BUSINESS of science has destroyed their credibility, and they only have themselves to blame.
As far as I'm aware, conventional oil production did in fact peak more than a decade ago. And while the Hubbert model failed to predict global oil production, in the absence of disruptions, it can work well (see eg Norway[1], or the lower-48 US states[2], where Hubbert's predictions made in '56 held true for 4 decades).
However, there's still unconventional oil[3] aplenty, hence the lack of panic. We should keep as much of it in the ground as we can.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Hubbert.svg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_...
Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are a lot of people who believe it genuinely, that when scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to mean "guess".
But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on where actually theory means infallible truth that mustn't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common man.
There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down and skeptics are excommunicated.
A guess in science is called a "hypothesis", it is only after it is proven right that it is properly called "theory".
There are infallible truths in science. We call them "observations". Any idea that follows from existing observations and has been used to predict new ones can be reasonably believed to be correct, but the truth is not the idea, it is the observations that inspired it.
And this is exactly why the public needs a better understanding of how science works.
If you really insist on making religious comparisons, a theory is neither a guess, nor an infallible truth, but a prophet who we trust because they make no predictions that cannot be verified, and because they have never been wrong so far, and so we will continue to believe them until the moment one of their predictions proves incorrect, at which time we will stop believing without hesitation.
Probably you don’t either. Did you know it is axiomatically impossible to prove anything to be true in science?
Every claim made by every scientist from the beginning of science to eternity has never ever been proven true. In science you can only falsify things.
If you don’t know this or don’t logically understand why this is the case then you never truly understood science.
People understand science from a cultural and political perspective. From a logical and axiomatic perspective, in science you cannot actually prove anything to be true.
This flaw within the actual framework of science itself is the origin of much of the misunderstandings and debates in the cultural and political arenas of science. For example no scientist can actually definitively prove global warming is real.
It is literally fundamentally impossible. Hence the politics.