Disliking some papers is not really a fair or relevant metric by which to judge academia.
This would be like saying, "programmers are elite people, because they never have to test their work. Just look at the thousands of broken, shoddy-programmed repositories on GitHub full of junk code that's been abandoned! Half of it doesn't build, and isn't even testable. Why are we paying for hackathons just to get this garbage. Why do we hire interns and new CS grads, if they won't be seasoned veterans on day one".
A paper can be seen as kind of like the "pull request" of the academic world -- not every PR gets merged in, and a PR isn't always a waste just because it didn't get merged. Some number of bad papers does not mean "science" is "elite".
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> That's how you get papers like the famous "feminist glaciology" paper [1]
That's probably a bad example, because the feminist glaciology paper isn't even bad or wrong. (Did you actually read it? Or did you only read the "feminist" and "glacier" and then get outraged?).
A quick scan of the actual paper, and Carey's argument seems to be that geologists and historians have been neglecting or ignoring how glaciers impact women (both the women in science doing these studies, and the women whose lives have been impacted by glaciers, or melt flow, flooding, disaster recovery, etc).
That's...like objectively true? And very well sourced. This isn't some crackpot theory, this is 100% a "validated idea" whose "results match reality".
Carey is an Environmental Historian and Professor of History. His papers are research and recordings of history, they won't be "testable" (under your definition of rubric) because he's reporting on things that have already happened. And this title specifically represents one (1) single paper that focuses on the impact to women, out of the 25(+?) he's published on Glaciers, Climate Change, and Societal impacts, over the past two decades.
If you want to remove Sociology and History from Science, so be it. (That would be Wrong, but I won't argue the point). But it should probably be expected that if you fund an Environmental Historian, you're going to get a lot research on Geological History and its societal impacts -- that's kind of the whole point of History as a discipline.