Knowing that someone is a dentist tells you little. They could be a good one or a bad one. They could have not practiced in a long time. It doesn't mean "dentist" is not a word. Scientist is a rather general one, but still means anyone to whom it is rightfully applied is many orders of magnitude more likely to have intelligent feedback on global warming than the general populace.
The term exists to delineate between a subset of the general populace and the rest. Just like dentist. Dentists are the subset of the population that you see when your tooth aches, and scientists (especially a few specializations) are the ones you ask when you want to know why the glaciers are melting.
When someone say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities. It's useful because it's talking about people in the know who are more apt to make such conclusions.
That's why you apologists try to demean the term. If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours.
> say scientists agree on global warming, its like saying dentists agree on the causes of cavities
Not even close. I really hope you can stop and think about this analogy and see how both the professional labels and the questions differ dramatically.
> If nobody is a scientist then nobody has any more valid opinion than yours
Nobody is a "scientist" because there's no such thing. There are etymologists and geologists and chemists and so on, just as there are plumbers and linguists, each qualified in their domains. As best I can tell all that unifies the "scientific professions" is that the paychecks are mostly from academia, because the work isn't commercially viable. That's not a slight at all, it's just to throw light on how ridiculous the distinction is. Any high IQ job involves problem solving and theory.
