When do we have a scientific fact?

There are two worlds colliding here.

The scientific world is primarily oriented towards finding stable consensus truths that are independent of individual bias.

The political world is primarily oriented towards persuasion and behaviour modification - either for personal gain, or (more rarely) to promote fairness, equality, and perhaps even opportunity.

To politicians, scientific facts are only one of many available tools for persuasion, and they're not particularly good at it.

These worlds are incompatible to such an extent that people operating in one world are fundamentally unable to understand the other.

So the question is really "How do you create a political consensus?" The answer is well-known - you set up numerous apparently independent think tanks and PR operations to promote your message across multiple media, you put journalists-for-hire in positions of notability and influence, you design soundbite concepts and memes that spread the message virally. You use psychological techniques learned from the ad industries and corporate psychology to dramatise and frame your message to make it more personally relatable.

For bonus points you set up an enemy who opposes your message and you demonise, belittle, and humiliate them.

Ideally you frame the "debate" to make disagreement literally unthinkable, while also making all supporters feel as if their beliefs are entirely their own, arrived at rationally and objectively.

Scientific consensus on its own will do none of this. And a scientific "fact" is powerless against this process.

Humans want "Laws of Nature" which are set in stone, easy to understand, written to kinda favor them, and subject to the sort of wording twists, rules-gaming, and lawyering that they're always doing with human social rules (including laws, promises, contracts, & such), to get away with crap.

Nature really doesn't care what humans want. Read every Superman comics ever written, dress up like him, jump off the cliff - and you'll go "splat" at the bottom.

Nature also never shows anyone the magic stone, which has all the rules written on it. Babies figure out pretty early that dropped objects fall to the ground. After a lot of bloody "splat"s, clever grown-ups figured out how to run off cliffs with parachutes & hang gliders and stuff, and live to brag about it. Usually. Things still go wrong sometimes.

Pretty much everything I've seen about on subjects like seems to boil down to humans wanting Nature to have rules that work their way, Nature not caring what humans want, and humans arguing about it anyway.

As a scientist I disagree. I would rather call just facts as facts, and the rest can still be called theories/models/understanding. I.e. only stuff that is directly observed can be a fact. For sure I think the evidence of human caused global warming is overwhelming and is based on to large degree simple physics, I would still not call that a fact.

I think relabeling some theories as facts is potentially dangerous and may prevent future progress.

To whoever downvoted: Why downvote instead of discussing the idea?

Author seems to be throwing a polite and courteous tantrum lacking serious intellectual rigor. Kuhn and Poppler left lasting marks because they were, in the author's apparent intended sense of the word, expressing facts.

There are 10,000 things wrong with this whole approach. The point, I assume, is that we do have some vitally important things that need doing sometimes, and wasting enormous finite resources trying to achieve even consensus, nevermind unanimity, has been rendered impossible or senseless or horrifically dangerous. Yep. That's a real problem (one might call it a fact).

This avenue is a dead end, though.