“Laypeople frequently assume that in a political dispute the truth must lie somewhere in the middle, and they are often right. In a scientific dispute, though, such an assumption is usually wrong.”
Paul Ehrlich

Science can be said to be the search for empirical truth about the universe. Politics is the struggle for power in the affairs of man. While scientists certainly use politics to their personal and professional advantage all too often, science itself does not compromise. If it claims to do so, it is not science, but rather, something else. For lack of a better term (and because there might not be one), this something else can be called “spinscience.”
Spinscience takes many forms and has, unfortunately, become a part of all our lives. It has been around for as long as science, but spinscience has reached new levels of cynicism, misrepresentation, deceit, fantasy, and fiction presented as fact. It is insidious, lacking in integrity or care for the world at large, and it is the way of many major corporations and, of course, their stooges, particularly those in the oil, coal, gas, automobile (and snowmobile), agricultural and mining businesses which, not coincidentally or surprisingly, are the largest financial supporters of many members of the U.S. Congress and other state and federal public servants whose integrity is for sale and whose care for the world is incomplete.
The subject of global warming offers just one example, albeit a large one, of spinscience in action in modern American government, in American business and, sad to say, in the minds of all too many citizens who should but somehow appear incapable of not knowing better. There is a worldwide scientific consensus that the earth’s atmosphere is warming up as a result of human activity. These same scientists recognize the uncertainty about the long term outcome of this warming and about many of the consequences along the way. The minions of spinscience, at the behest of the business interests paying them, have managed to twist legitimate scientist’s uncertainty about the outcome of global warming into uncertainty about the phenomenon of global warming. This is not just disingenuous. It is a lie.
To paraphrase the good Gertrude Stein: A lie is a lie is a lie.
There is a well funded (think the Koch brothers) network of organizations involved in the spinscience of global warming. For the most part the money can be followed (think Deep Throat) to the oil, coal, gas, mining, agriculture and automobile industries, which, apparently, will do anything to keep the truth about global warming from being comprehended by the American public. These organizations are not scientific bodies, but, rather, public relations, propaganda and lobbying groups, using science the way some politicians and some terrorists use ‘God’ (think James Inhofe) as an excuse for saying and doing anything that fits their agenda. That is, they make the mythical claim to having science/God on their side, but they do not. They only have spinscience on their side.
Spinscience has no place in an honest debate or, for that matter, in a deep breath of clean, unpolluted air, which is harder and harder to find every day on planet Earth.
Think of that.