Your use of an imagined ignorant politician wielding the phrase 'scientific consensus' in the affirmative as a disagreeable act seems odd to me. It is generally

Your use of an imagined ignorant politician wielding the phrase 'scientific consensus' in the affirmative as a disagreeable act seems odd to me. It is generally the 'skeptic' ignorantly asserting 'there is no consensus' which brings focus to the concept in that debate: "The skeptic attitude to consensus usually starts with “there is no consensus”. That’s wrong, and they usually retreat from it to “but consensus science is meaningless”, and/or “consensus has nothing to do with science”. The latter is largely true but irrelevant. The existence of the consensus doesn’t do a lot to determine what science is done; it doesn’t prevent contrary lines being explored. But the consensus view does come into the tricky interface between science and policy, and science and the media." [1] > they assert that results about medical science are distorted by financial pressures, etc. I'm not sure what you mean here? Much science conducted is so distorted by financial pressure that it isn't scientific. Consider how an entire area of research in the pharmaceutical industry should probably just be binned [2]. Considering this, it is more essential than ever in considering the individuals carrying out the research. As long as we have weak and corrupted regulatory systems there will be a continued distrust of any industry-sponsored research, and in many areas that's the research that dominates. Until there's a global change in how research is funded and conducted there seems little hope of trusting that the output is very scientific. [1] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/just-what-is-this-consensus-anyway/ http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/just-w... [2] http://www.badscience.net/books/bad-pharma/ http://www.badscience.net/books/bad-pharma/