You may be the first actual scientist I've seen post in one of these discussions. That's a very well written explanation of the realities of research.
Mod this guy up!

This comment displays a vast ignorance of how research actually gets done. Most research is funded to gain knowledge, regardless of the result (otherwise it would simply be called 'knowing', not research). Note for instance that the drug companies continue spending millions dollars on basic research year after year, even when they don't get an immediate result. So don't broad-brush the dedicated work of hundreds of thousands of scientists with your own questionable view of ethics.

The people who are not motivated enough to put in the effort are not scientists - they are pundits. Researchers who are truly interested in their work - and that would be most of them - put in decades of observation and analysis looking for some truth, because simply grinding an axe would never be personally satisfying. It is lazy and disrespectful of you and other armchair commentators to simply dismiss all that work with a three-line opinion.

Yeah, it's just you. AP News found no evidence of massaged or ignored data (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091212/ap_on_sc/climate_e_mails). So climate science is a poor example of this thesis.

You just proved the author's point.

You just proved the author's thesis.

AGW research has been going on for nearly 50 years, but the most heated controversy has only been the last decade. However you want to frame the debate at this moment in time, there has still been at least forty years of good, undisturbed research to build on. Hence AGW is science, whereas the opinionated skeptics are politicians at heart.

The theory is that unprecedented levels of CO2 are forcing unprecedented levels of global temperature increase (and glacial retreat) due to CO2's ability to capture and re-radiate infrared energy, which can be demonstrated in the lab. The question is whether you're willing to bet that there is some (currently unknown) natural process which can balance that unprecedented heating, or whether we're toast.

There's a major, man-made difference this time: atmospheric CO2 has increased 30% in the last century, to the highest level in a million years (according to ice cores). Are you willing to bet against that making a major, permanent change in our climate? A change that might, for instance, make vast amounts of US farmland unusable due to drought?

How does this constitute a 'complete hoax' of global warming when literally thousands of other researchers have produced thousands of papers over the last twenty years showing similar trends in atmospheric temperature, ocean temperature, glacial retreat, permafrost melting, seasonal trends, species migration and etc?

If the data was manipulated, then why does it show the same trends as NASA and NOAA data? And how come it agrees with research by the Germans, Australians, Japanese, Candians and French? I mean, come on, when do the French *ever* agree with anyone else?