Problem Solving Essay

One of the great things people get to look forward to in an election year after Labor Day is the bombardment of campaign material from the various politicians running for office. Frequently they lay out their platforms on social, financial, and environmental stances. Of course, one of their hot topics is climate change, formerly referred to as global warming. Many of these politicians refer a plethora of research done by various institutions. What one doesn’t hear about is the large amounts of grant money provided by the government and private industry to conduct research. We have heard the arguments for and against global warming that have polarized a populace, politicians, and even the researchers themselves. We have experienced the fights in the media about research and some of the claims of bullying opposing view points, non peer reviewed data, and scientists fighting freedom of information requests over data. It is by keeping this research and data politicized that truly prevents society from making an informed decision on the future of our planet.

By changing the way the system currently works, we as a populace could truly determine what direction our politicians would follow in creating intelligent and useful legislation. By forcing researchers to share their data in the scientific community one could eliminate the divisions that we currently experience today. This is why the scientific process was created and the only way to get unbiased, easily reproduced, and reliable data. Through enforcing this simple principal one also takes out the need for keeping research secret and continuing the scientific community’s drive for grant money. Frequently, researchers, their universities, and their labs are more concerned with receiving grant money, than they are in providing reliable data. So, if there isn’t a problem with found by a study, why would one continue to need funding? The saccharin studies from the past are a prime example of this malfeasance in...