Sorry this is disingenuous. Sure, science is not about appealing to a specific authority, but you do need some background and training in it to be able to pull off the necessary experiments and understand the theory.
How would you and your 4 year old go about deciding whether you believe in Quantum Electrodynamics? Would you do an experiment, or would you ask an expert?
Not wanting to step into an argument here, but I'd like to tie it back to the climate thing.
I think it's cool that you'd go to an expert to see a reproducible experiment. I'm also going to assume that it goes without saying (could be putting words in your mouth but it seems to flow from your responses) that you'd ask a lot of questions if there was unfamiliar math or concepts and basically receive very narrowly focused training in the fields around the experiment.
It's interesting to consider the likelihood/prevalence of the casual commenters on climate change (ie the ones being referred to as idiots) reproducing the climate scientists experiments or coming up to speed on the maths/concepts behind the experiment to be able to critique the experiment in the way that an expert in the field with an opinion opposed to the prevailing thought could.
I know quite a few very vocal climate change skeptics and none of them have a science background or the willingness to attain one, and they seem very proud of that. Hopefully that's a local quirk of my small sample relative to the population.
As an aside, if you can find a set of experts with the time to spend (plus, you know, equipment and money) I'd bet a decent chunk of change that you could take the prevailing scientific opinion and ask for reproducible experiments - in this case a lot would involve analysis of data already given to explain why they want to test want they want to - then you'd end up if not agreeing with them then at seeing where they were coming from.
How would you and your 4 year old go about deciding whether you believe in Quantum Electrodynamics? Would you do an experiment, or would you ask an expert?