Trust science, and scientists ? Sure can...

...Some media commentators with a special interest in science think they detect a palpable lack of trust within the community for science and scientists. As is often the case, such a lack of trust is over-stated. Its existence however, is real, and may be growing. It is seen in limited areas, particularly healthcare (and the billion dollar alternative medicine industry is responsible for this. Think iridology, homeopathy, reflexology, etc, etc.) Within climate science the distrust has arisen from the unholy alliance between climate scientists and politicians, inside and outside of Government, and the reluctance and inability of many within the climate science community to question political distortion of their findings. This comment below is unashamedly pinched from Australian Climate Madness and sums up the situation well...In reality... there isn't a lack of respect for scientists as a whole, there is a lack of respect for CLIMATE scientists and their associated advocates and public figures. We still trust doctors to make the right diagnoses, trust our engineers to build safe buildings and bridges, trust the particle physicists when they tell us that a multi-billion dollar circle of magnets kilometres across is required to find a new sub-atomic particle. No-one questions any of that. The problem with climate scientists and their hangers-on is the result of the actions of a small but visible minority, who are guilty of:

politicising science by advocating particular responses to climate change (most of which will damage our standards of living for no benefit)
claiming that the IPCC is an impartial review of climate science,
passing off greenpeace and WWF propaganda as credible science,
making catastrophist predictions about future climate,
conflicting themselves by accepting research grants from a government that itself advocates AGW alarmist policies,
playing down uncertainty in their results and claiming the science is settled,
fudging data in order to make it fit with their pre-conceived conclusions,
silencing dissent and skewing the peer-review process (so that it essentially becomes "pal-review")
refusing to share methods and calculations for independent confirmation of their results,
hypocritical do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitudes (eg. Al Gore and Flannery, above)
abusing and smearing (dare I say, disrespecting) anyone that dares mention any of the above.Those are the simple reasons why climate science as a discipline has lost respect. The public is not stupid, and it can see when it is being misled. More openness, more debate, more honesty and less divisive language would help reverse the trend. Read the full article here...