Comment by bccdee

Newtonian physics is still settled science even though we have relativity to give more accurate results in domains where Newtonian mechanics fails. It still holds in all the same places it used to.

You don't seem to understand how scientific models and theories work.

In fact, germ theory of medicine is much the same way. Germ Theory does not explain or predict or account for ALL disease, for example PTSD, and if you build a useful theory for mental illnesses that aren't caused by little creatures of some sort, that doesn't overturn germ theory, it compliments it. A person creating a new theory of how Long Covid hurts people for example may not stick strictly to germ theory, but that would STILL not overturn germ theory.

>Can you think of any cases where the science had nearly full consensus and it was useful to re-litigate? Galileo isn't the only example.

Galileo isn't an example of the science being "settled" and someone radically overturning it. Nobody believed in geocentrism due to "Science", which is also why Galileo had so much difficulty, it was literally a religious matter. Kepler was about as close as we had to any sort of consistent theory to how the heavenly bodies moved, and it was not at all settled, and yet he was still basically right

In actuality, there are remarkably few times where a theory was entirely overturned, especially by a new theory. When we know little enough about a field that we could get something so wrong, we usually don't have much in the way of "theory" and are still spitballing, and that's not considered settled science. If you want a good feeling for what this looks like, go read up on the debates science had when we first started looking at Statistical Mechanics and basics of thermodynamics. There were heated(lol) debates about the very philosophy of science, and whether we should really rely on theories that don't seem like they are physical, and that mostly went away as it continued to bear high quality predictions. The problems and places where theories are not great are usually well understood by the very scientists who work through a theory, because understanding the parameter space and confidence intervals for a theory are a requirement of using that theory successfully.

"Human CO2 and other pollutants are the near totality of the cause of the globe warming" is settled science.

"The globe is warming" is settled science

"Global warming will cause changes in micro and macro climates all over" is settled science

"A hotter globe will result in more energetic, chaotic, and potentially destructive weather" is settled science and obvious

"Global warming is going to kill us all in a decade" is NOT settled science. There is no settled science for how bad climate change will make things for us, who will be worst affected, who might benefit, etc. There is comprehensive agreement among climate scientists that global warming is harmful to our future, and something we have to try and reduce the effect of, prepare for the outcomes of, and adapt to the consequences of, and something that, whether we do anything to combat it, will be immensely costly to handle.

“Just a theory” is simply a signal that they have no clue about basics of scientific process.

Ironically, it's often attributed to religion that they claim settled truths that can't be proven.