Well I would say its intellectually to say there are no competing theories. There are tons of competing theories just not ones that have had that much amount of money thrown at. Its like the insistence before a few years ago that dinosaur bones could not contain soft tissue, until we started looking and many of them do, an accepted scientific impossibility but then one day turns out it was wrong and we don't know why. So people come up with new theories to explain.
Science does not ever claim something is fact until it is proven fact, 97% is not 100% and proving something that complex as fact would be scientifically speaking very difficult, this is why you have people not denying the earth is warming but denying human beings are the reason.
It's just semantics: I can pull several 'competing theories' out of my ass right now, they might not be very convincing, or take long to disprove.
There are tons of competing theories just not ones that have had that much amount of money thrown at.
It's been several decades: the corporations who wish to ignore anthropogenic global warming do not lack financial resources (money is NO problem), but all they can do is nitpick about minor details and try to play on conspiracy theories. If there was a real contending theory to global warming caused by human greenhouse gasses - you would know about it, and it would be intensively studied. They've got nothing.
Again, you can pray for a miracle, that something will come up that completely turns the science on its head, but don't hold your breath.
As I mentioned before, do some reading on other scientific theories like quantum mechanics or relativity: That shit is infinitely crazier than humans warming the earth and nobody gives a shit, because the implications don't clash with corporate profits.
I've audited all of MIT's quantum mechanics courses on opencourseware several times, I am very familiar with quantum mechanics. I've also read quite a few biography on Einstein and read many of his papers. That being said at this point I am betting you do not have a strong grasp on quantum field theory, quantum computers or much else in that area of science. I find all of that fascinating so I have studied it. Probability is everything, like literally everything exists as probabilities until it is observed, which collapses the wave function to produce a result. There are many competing theories to that even though that is what we observe, yet 97% of scientists don't accept it. Its a repeatable testable observable thing we can recreate over and over, so why doesn't 97% of the scientific community agree that is what is going on?
If you think quantum mechanics is just about probabilities, you don't get it.
We are not weighing up probabilities of Schrodinger's cat being alive or dead in the box before we open it: The cat is not alive or dead until we open the box, it is both simultaneously.
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