[photon]

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

The problem with political involvement is that the science is biased towards the hand that is feeding it. It really is lose lose for us.

Scientists may become biased, but science as a process is not (and cannot be). And science as a process works to weed out bias.

Just like with second hand smoke, or anything that threatens a company's desire to do what it wants to max shareholder value, there will always be some companies that will try and muddy the waters by paying "scientists" to generate disinformation. Often those scientists are well known for what they do however, there's a common cast of characters around since the days of "second hand smoke is fine".

On the other hand there are counter examples, the Koch brothers hired a scientist that had leanings against the consensus to generate a different temperature record (presumably to have something to point to to say NASA and those guys are all wrong), but ended up with another temperature record that confirmed the other ones... so the scientist stuck to the actual science rather than being biased towards the hand that feeds it.

And given two options, one that most scientists are people who are passionate about science and will let the results speak for themselves and two that there's this vast conspiracy among tens of thousands of scientists that don't actually care about science and will falsify results on a global scale across dozens of different scientific disciplines (biologists, zoologists, geologists, astronomers, physicists, botanists, etc etc) in order to.. well I don't even know what it would be in order to do, I know which option seems more reasonable.

Originally Posted by Erick Estrada

The information is all skewed depending on where it originated.

Then go to the origin of the source, the information is freely available, and many climate scientists host or participate in blogs and other online venues.

Originally Posted by opendoor

You need to draw a distinction between lobbying and PR groups and the actual science. Scientific consensus isn't being perverted by monetary interests, just the public discourse is.

That's a really good way to put it, I like it.

The monetary interests don't care about actually doing science or coming up with alternatives to the consensus, their field of play isn't science (where they have to put up or shut up), it's public opinion.