It would be interesting if some topic in the field of software got as much public attention and debate by non-practioners as does climate change.
On one side (because there have to be two sides, and presented in a "fair and balanced" way, of course), you'd have the vast majority of working programmers all agree with the position that, say, writing software in a high level language is much more productive and useful than writing everything in machine language. And on the other side you'd have some non-programmers who are "skeptical" and coming up with all kinds of arguments why machine language is best. The skeptics would point out what they say are flaws in the reasoning, gaps in the data, etc.
This line of thought is not meant to argue that man-made global warming or catastrophic climate change are true and urgent, but rather to argue that perhaps that it doesn't make sense for non-scientists to take a stand on this issue -- especially taking a stand against the position of those who have vastly more knowledge and experience with the topic. Might they be wrong? Of course. But they are probably way more likely to be right than the average bloke on the street.
Non-scientists can take a legitimate stand on the methods, e.g. the statisticians from Canada who destroyed the hockey stick. We'd see even more of that if the data, code and methods were public (pity the original raw collected data was lost (much of it might be recoverable if someone were to go back to the original national weather service sources)).
I think you're also misrepresenting the nature of the debate; it would be a lot more like everyone arguing about managed (GCed) code vs. unmanaged (C/C++/Objective C etc. with manual memory management). The other side, and plenty of them are scientists and even specialists in this area, are not arguing the equivalent of "machine code is best", an idea that died very shortly after the advent of symbolic assemblers.
On one side (because there have to be two sides, and presented in a "fair and balanced" way, of course), you'd have the vast majority of working programmers all agree with the position that, say, writing software in a high level language is much more productive and useful than writing everything in machine language. And on the other side you'd have some non-programmers who are "skeptical" and coming up with all kinds of arguments why machine language is best. The skeptics would point out what they say are flaws in the reasoning, gaps in the data, etc.
This line of thought is not meant to argue that man-made global warming or catastrophic climate change are true and urgent, but rather to argue that perhaps that it doesn't make sense for non-scientists to take a stand on this issue -- especially taking a stand against the position of those who have vastly more knowledge and experience with the topic. Might they be wrong? Of course. But they are probably way more likely to be right than the average bloke on the street.