That is all valid CDub. The "studies" that are currently underway and those that have been published over the past 10 years or so are influenced by those who fund them.
It would be really nice if people would set things aside and do some of their own research.
What in the world are you talking about? As a practicing member of the scientific community, who has received my share of grant funding and published several dozen peer-reviewed articles, I've never once had that funding or publishing those papers contingent on adhering to anyone's "agenda".
Scientists are the real skeptics. We actually do the investigations and push back against whatever the latest conventional thinking is, rather than just talk about it (like some so-called climate skeptics who like to be in the news but do scant little actual research). We do not personally profit from this research. Funding is extremely hard to get and is getting ever more difficult. And we are catlike contrarian creatures who pick at and claw away at each other's findings, probing for weaknesses and looking for stronger patterns and explanations than currently exist. That's how we're trained to think and act, and we embrace the hunt. Question authority. Question conventional thinking. Question everything.
Politicians and mediots do have agendas and they take our findings and mangle them to prove their own points, etc. They do this because the lazy public want binary yes/no black/white type outcomes, because they can't deal with uncertainty or probabilistic prognostications (unless they're buying life insurance) and they don't understand that science is a
process of discovery, not an encyclopedia of information.
There's not much we can do about this, because scientific literacy in this country is so piss poor. And frankly I don't blame anyone but the ignorant themselves for being ignorant. It's an outcome of a lazy, instant gratification, please tell me the answer so I don't have to think society.
