It is all activism it was from the very start when Hansen screwed with the air conditioning in the Senate committee room.
Having been involved in the academic scene and seen the _demand_ on academics to generate X papers a term written and get those papers accepted by the right publication/academic association; I can assure you that 'science' is a figment of the imagination of a lot of people. The paper to be accepted has hurdles to pass.
1. The paper must have a set of references to provide the logic backup of the subject of the paper
2. The paper must have the subject du jour for the publication/association or it will not even be read
3. Peer review is normally limited to: does the paper feed the confirmation bias of the peer if it does (see 2) then it will be parsed for writing style and whether the references stroke the peer reviewer's ego (i.e. they are papers from the peer review group)
This leads to an institutional gullibility - references are believed, NOBODY attempts to check and repeat the research in the references. So entire edifices of research can be based on incorrect research. How many times here is an argument settled by quoting a research paper? How many times has the person quoting actually checked the reliability of the paper and its assumptions?
I think that Climate 'science' - like a lot of areas of science are houses of cards where the base research is flawed and/or misrepresented. It has now been taken over by financiers and politicians - recovering from the flawed research will be VERY difficult
And of course virtue signalling Educators are all in as this is a way to get promoted and save the world. Unfortunately, the erudition of modern teachers is greatly overrated.