Is it just a ploy to force things on us we like even less than windows 10?
No. It is primarily based upon the unavoidable fact, discovered ~100 years ago, of the irradiative properties of certain atmospheric gases and the effect that changes in the concentrations of these have on climate. More specifically, modern climate models combine our knowledge of climate systems with simulations of temperature data in order to determine the magnitude of the (almost certainly positive) all-important (net) feedback (parameter). The foundations of the theory predate it and are rather simple. The problem is how increases in emissions relate to increases in atmospheric concentrations and the ways in which such increases change and are changed by the dynamical interactions among and within climate systems, how to construct (simulate) temperature from the various records, etc.
Scientists aren't going to be convinced of something unless their experiments and reproducible experiments yield the same results.
Scientists are usually convinced about results prior to any experiments (which are generally designed to confirm ideas about the nature of some aspect of some model or theory or whatever) and will typically ascribe failures to obtain the expected results to the experimental design and methods. These are then altered until the desired experimental outcome is obtained. Luckily, other researchers often have opposing views about the ideas underlying the experiments. Neither they nor anybody else typically ever reproduce any experiment (reproducibility is a bit of a misnomer; in actuality, it tends to refer not to replications of the same experiment but to some similar experiment utilizing the same logic and inferences and seeing if either of these are problematic). They do put the ideas to the test, however.
A majority of theoretical physicists in particle physics, high energy physics, and cosmology are convinced that string theory provides the correct description of all of fundamental physics, and in particular the unification of quantum mechanics with modern gravitation theories (general relativity and variations/extensions of it). They believe this “theory” to be correct. The problem is not the complete lack of any experimental support for this theory. It isn’t even that nobody knows how such an experiment might be conducted. It’s that nobody knows what the actual theory is supposed to be. That is, there is a rather hazy notion about the nature of the mathematics required to make the ill-defined concepts motivating the theory, but no consistent formulation of the basic equations which ought to (and it is widely believed eventually will) form the foundation of whatever string theory will turn out to be.
The biomedical model of mental illness is almost universally accepted by the medical community and by many neurologists, clinical neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, etc. It not only lacks experimental support, the experimental data that has emerged in thousands of studies since the biomedical model took over has actually completely undermined any hope for the basic, fundamental component of this theory: that there exist a unique, biological pathology underlying each of the discrete diseases defined into existence in the DSM & ICD.
The standard model of particle physics consists of a variety of failures that were fixed
post hoc in mathematical ways (e.g., renormalization, group theoretic symmetries, etc.) including the problem of mass: the standard model predicts that no particles have mass. The Higgs mechanism was adopted long before any experimental evidence for it. Since the 2012 announcement of the first evidence for its detection, we haven’t learned anything much about whether the mechanism is actually anything real, or even whether “the Higgs” was even detected. In quantum fields theories, statistical mechanics, etc., heavy use is made of what is called the S-matrix (S for scattering). This was originally the main theoretical tool for an approach to fundamental physics known as the “bootstrap” program in which there were no elementary particles. For reasons that had more to do with mathematical elegance than empirical findings, this program was abandoned in favor of the quark model and a re-adoption of quantized field theories. The S-matrix is still widely used and incredibly important, though, which makes the bootstrap philosophy/program at least less of a failure than the rise and fall of the fifth force in modern physics.
I could go on, but the point is that scientists frequently adhere to theories in spite of hundreds or thousands of contradictory experimental findings, the lack of any experimental evidence, or even the failure to show how these theories could be experimentally tested.
Climate science, and in particular anthropogenic global warming theory, has constantly failed to produce models with predictive power, and relies fundamentally on the failure for our models based upon our (currently limited) understanding of climate systems to “predict” past temperatures without inserting a positive feedback parameter or “forcing” that is supposed to be due to the effect that GHG emissions have on the dynamics of climate systems. Unfortunately, our models have failed so completely that simulations of past temperatures based on proxy data were and are published despite the fact that these have failed to predict the warming of the 20th century, none of our models predicted the current “hiatus” and there is no consensus as to what caused it or even to what extent it is a lack of warming for nearly 20 years.
How am I not surprised that a global warming denier thinks that scientists don't believe in the scientific method.
Scientists don’t believe in any such method, at least none who have reflected about the actual processes, procedures, and methods they used in comparison to the myth of The Scientific Method taught in schools.
