Nowadays, people notice something. And then some academics come along from their ivory tower and their computer models and they say, “I think that maybe the initial conditions were like this ... and then I’m going to guess that this happened ... also a possible follow-up was this other event ... and I conjecture that this other thing resulted.”
And that’s how a lot of science is done these days. At least, that’s how “settled science” is done these days. All that’s left is to type up the paper.
NOTE: some people actually do real science. But almost none of them work in climate science. I could name other fields which are basically frauds but I’ll stick with climate for now.
There no Science of the Climate. Not even good Engineering estimates.