I completely agree that science in principle can be verified by anyone. That is how papers are published and books written. In practice that does not happen. I

I completely agree that science in principle can be verified by anyone. That is how papers are published and books written. In practice that does not happen. If you gave me a paper from my own subfield of physics, it would take me at least a week to verify it. If you gave me a paper from a different subfield of physics, it would at least take me a few months to verify its correctness. If you gave me a paper from climate change, it would take me years to verify its correctness. There are so much background knowledge, skills, and understanding I lack about the details of climate change. My unknown unknowns about climate change are massive. I believe in climate change research because I believe in the social institutions of science, that peer review works, that universities and professors have reputational effects to take care of, that climate change experts themselves constantly fight over the answers of various questions, that climate-change-adjacent-field-experts sometimes verify what climate scientists do, etc etc. I am also happy that climate change, in particular, makes predictions about the future (other fields, say Biology, don't make predictions about the future), so some amount of verification can happen that way. But honestly, I have never done that, because again, that is several weeks worth of actual work. TLDR Science does not have authority figures, but it does have a web of experts and social institutions, which keep each other in check, and which is why outsiders actually believe in them, in practice.