I see what you're saying. but at the same time, from a layman's perspective, we don't see data from Scientists nearly so much as we see articles from journalists reporting data from scientists. Journalists don't seem to go through the same scrutiny as what you have to go through. Most of us wouldn't understand the data if we had to read it ourselves.
so we get conflicting stories. on my newsfeed today I hear the oceans may rise 20-25 feet in the next 20 years because of global warming and we may be headed for a new ice age.
On any given day you hear that a new study tells you that eggs are good for you and that eggs will kill you. Chocolate will heal cancer and it's killing America. Store bought Vitamins??? sheesh who knows!
So I don't know, you are a lot more knowledgeable on this subject than I am. Most of the time, I just base my opinion on who funded the study. Chicken farm study always agree that eggs are good for ya. Hershey's is trying to cure cancer, I'm sure.
as far as global warming, I don't live anywhere other than where I live. But the winters have been pretty harsh the last few years, as harsh as I've seen ever. And in the summer time, until this week, it's been too cool to get in my pool. And last year we barely swam at all because it was too cool. The last 2 years late frosts killed my peach blossoms and for the first time ever I deer hunted in the snow in mid November. Maybe things are happening in other places to counter act that but I just see what I see.
You can read the scientific journals with the data included, the summaries that get put on websites usually take data out to make it easier to read for non-scientist readers. The biggest issue is that they usually charge you to read the journals, however if you connect through a university's internet you'll typically be able to download all the journals you want for free.
You may get conflicting stories from different news outlets that may misread things, but usually you can see what the scientists actually say. This little ice age is a good example of that, the study they were talking about didn't say a single thing about weather. What happened is the team said it should produce conditions (on the sun) not seen since the Maunder Minimum, and some journalists probably googled what that was, and then ran with the ice age crap without actually looking into it. That's one of the issues with the news outlets, but that's not the scientists fault. In fact when someone finally went to ask her (the lead scientist for the study) about the ice age, she laughed about it and said they were reading it wrong. She said it might lead to some colder winters, but the idea that another ice age with brutal Hollywood like weather is silly. Essentially what I said before. She isn't a climate scientist, she's an Astrophysicist, and made a prediction about the Sun. In fact it still needs to be confirmed, and some of my colleagues have already looked over a lot of the data to try and confirm it (so far they've indicated that her team appears to be correct in their assessment that we will have a period of low sunspot activity).
Another issue is that there are scientific studies and there are "scientific" studies... A lot of pseudoscience will make bullshit claims about how ____ magic food will help cure cancer and other things like that, and it's all bullshit. You just have to ignore that stuff really.
Global warming is a bit of a misnomer as well, which is why they've switched to saying climate change. Climate is pretty complex and a lot of different things factor into it.. Again, I'm not a climate scientist, so I don't know the nitty gritty details, but I know it's pretty complex. Some winters will be brutal some will not. Even this last winter, saw some especially harsh ones on the East Coast. However much of the world saw record hot winters, and the overall global temperature was the hottest on record. So people on the East Coast had a very cold winter and many came to the conclusion that "Well it's cold here, so it must be wrong" but that's not accurate. Plus climate change can lead to harsher blizzards due to the instability of the climate.
In terms of fudging data, I wont say it doesn't happen, because it does. However if the data for climate change was being fudged we'd most certainly know it by now. You can't fake that much data for decades and not have things come out. The more we learn the more accurate our predictions become (which is why you may see things change over time), but that is the same as any field. Hell in my field (Astrophysics) we just found out that Pluto is larger than we originally had thought it was thanks to New Horizons. As our understanding of the universe and our solar system has grown we've changed the classification of Pluto to a planet to a dwarf planet, we discover new things all the time that change how we conduct work. We just discovered a new particle, the pentaquark, that could have some big changes to how we see the structure of matter. That's the good thing about science, there's always more to learn and discover in this age. That's why it doesn't typically pay to fake data anymore, if you get caught you're screwed, and if you do and someone else proves you wrong (but they don't bust you for faking it) then your data is meaningless anyway. It's hard to get picked up for new projects or universities, or even get yourself published if you faked a bunch of data that was disproved by a later study.
