The scientists HAVE NOT TURNED POLITICAL, it was the likes of Inhofe, Miloy, Watts, Morano and a host of other NON-SCIENTISTS who found that their status-quo would be adversely affected by any policy changes if the SCIENCE were acted on are the ones who turned climate science in a poltical battle. Exactly the same strategy followed by the tobacco industry to discredit those scientists whose work showed the link between lung cancer and smoking. Indeed Steve Miloy, who devised the tobacco strategy freely admits he suggested using the same strategy for climate science to the oil/gas industry. Thus you get Dennis Avery who worked for the tobacco industry via the Hudson Instititue suddenly becoming a climate scientist even though he has NEVER done any work or even taken a course in either meteorology or climatology. Given that "distinguished scientists" were need to back the disinformation/politicalization campaign they tried people Fredrick Sietz. Unfortunately Sietz said in an interview in May 2006 “‘They didn’t want us looking at the health effects of cigarette smoking,’ but it nevertheless served the tobacco industry’s purposes. Throughout those years, the industry frequently ran ads in newspapers and magazines citing its multi-million-dollar research program as proof of its commitment to science—and arguing that the evidence on the health effects of smoking was mixed.” Unfortunately Sietz didn't serve either the tobacco or the science deniers very well. In a 1989 internal memo from tobacco company Philip Morris explaining that Seitz “is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice.” Then Arthur Robinson and Sietz got into further trouble with the Oregon Petition. Arthur Robinson and Sietz along with the Exxon-backed George C. Marshall Institute, co-published the infamous “Oregon Petition” claiming to have collected 17,000 signatories to a document arguing against the realities of global warming. The petition and the documents included were all made to look like official papers from the prestigious National Academy of Science. They weren’t, and this attempt to mislead has been well-documented. Along with the petition there was a cover letter from Seitz. Also attached to the petition was an apparent “research paper” titled: Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. The paper was made to mimic what a research paper would look like in the National Academy’s prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy journal. This was just the first salvo in the politization of science in order to stall off any policy changes. When the oil/gas industry started dumping metric buttloads of money into the science denial project all sorts of "climater scientists" came out of the wood work. People like Ian Pilmer, washed up and retired geologist, Tim Ball, who has not published a single research paper in 11 years in ANY TOPIC, Tony Watts who isn't a meteorologist, but claims he is, Gerhard Gerlich, a physcist who says the first and second laws of thermodynamics are wrong