[Taraz]

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This reminds me of a story one of my best friends told me a while ago about his aunt. She had a Ph.D from a prestigious university and every day after coming home from work she would drink. She was an alcoholic. He wasn't scared of her and she wasn't a mean drinker, but for a long while he never had the courage to ask her what exactly her doctorate was in or what her job was. Eventually he asked and he summarized her response for me. She said the highest paying job for many postgraduate degree-holders is in making announcements to the press and public - for an organization - so that they can reference and cite the material with false credibility. Almost always it involved unethical representation of data and solely was for the progression of some agenda. She was sickened by her job and so she drank to forget it.

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Would you mind sharing what kind of organization she worked for? Was it one that had business interests or was it a scientific organization?

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In the ideal world, money would be meaningless to politicians and scientists. But they can still be bought. For every scientist developing a stem cell based cure for parkinsons, there's a scientist working for NASA whose sole job is to deny the existence of global warming as verbally as possible.

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Yeah, this administration has been especially bad about casting doubt on the claims of science. It scares the crap out of me.

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And as we all know, losing trust is easy, gaining it is difficult. How can the scientific community expect to hold the trust of the people when the same labels that are intended to set them apart are being abused to push political agendas?

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Very true. Also scary.

But we have to remember that other countries are doing research on these issues as well. It's a WORLDWIDE consensus. The best research from Europe and Asia confirm the scientific consensus within the U.S.