This assumes a very naive view that the average university researcher is trying to challenge prevailing theories on a daily basis. The reality is that challenging prevailing theories of science is near impossible in today's grant-chasing arena called academia. Do you really think a grant proposal that questions some of the prevailing views in climate science is going to get funded? And even if does get funded, good luck getting it published in any mainstream journal.
Heck I can't even challenge my own supervisors when they make swallow statements that are in fact contradicted by a bunch of papers, how could I get funding from external entities by submitting socially unpopular ideas? Impossible, especially in highly politicized fields.
And even if you did, it wouldn't disprove the consensus on climate change in any way. Or are you also saying that all the research was falsified? Any evidence of that?
The correct way to accomplish this is to take something that you think you can disprove, design an experiment that would show that the existing theory may be incorrect and then successfully defend that.
Say for instance you hypothesised that methane doesn't in fact act as a greenhouse gas, you design an experiment that shows that increasing the % methane in the upper atmosphere doesn't result in additional heat being captured. You would then need to collect the results, properly show they are consistent with your hypothesis vs your control data and then defend that in peer review.
In this case you would most likely be wrong because we are pretty damn sure methane isn't great but if you had an idea that had a chance I am sure you could get funding.
It is worth mentioning that the ability to get funding is somewhat correlated with the interestingness and likelihood of a groundbreaking finding. Finding methane is not contributing to greenhouse effect would be a massive finding, however the likelihood it isn't is low because there already exists a huge body of evidence that supports the opposite conclusion.
TLDR: You can definitely work on attempting to prove climate change isn't happening but you probably need a very clever idea as everyone else that has looked at it thus far hasn't come up with anything capable of disproving it.
I would assume that there are organizations that try to fund proposals that question some of the prevailing views in climate science otherwise where do all these papers come from that anti-climate change people like to refer to?
Wouldn't there be a bunch of companies with a lot of wealth and strong incentives to fund that sort of thing?
Put your money where your beliefs are, so to speak
Why does every fossil fuel company accept the science of climate change.
Not just that they are unable to get their contrarian studies published in academic papers.
No, they literally spend a ton of money in Super Bowl ads trying to convince the world that they are trying to reduce climate change.
And they have pages on their websites:
BP: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability.html
Exxon: https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmenta...
There’s almost no organization other than the American right in the world that currently denies the reality of climate change.
No, science depends on falsifiable theories being tested and proved. The whole point of science is to remove flawed, human bias, of which consensus depends on.
I’m guessing you think God comes down to earth to announce that yea, this theory is proven!
The tests passing or failing. And sure, the tests are designed by humans, but that's why there are controls, and there is no limit on how many tests per hypothesis. Each test can improve on the previous one, every time removing more and more of the bias, if needed.
This is what I'm calling consensus btw. Because in science we don't just trust the experiments of a single person or group. They present it, we say "wow that's cool. Let me try to poke holes in it" and then a bunch of people do that and we gain strong evidence that that person was correct.
This is ahistorical. The Annalen der Physik, where Einstein's four Annus Mirabilis papers were published, did not have peer review.
Only one paper by Einstein was peer reviewed. It was -- in effect -- rejected from Physical Review. While the paper ("Do Gravitational Waves Exist?", with Rosen) was mistaken (in its conclusion of "no"), even then the referee wrote that Einstein "is a man of good scientific standing, and it would seem to me that if he insists, he has more right to be heard than any single referee has to throttle!"
We post papers on ArXiv now and they don't have "peer review", except they do because our peers read them and talk about them, open issues on GitHub, exchange emails, and write blogs. If that isn't peer review, I don't know what is. Your definition of peer review is far too limited and not what science actually is doing.
However, I agree that in the context of this thread, post-publication peer review -- usually referred to by another name -- is very important, as it plays a strong role in the formation of consensus being discussed.