Thanks for having the ovaries or balls to speak up for your until now silent cohort, and OK I'll name names. Here's one great example: Amy Moritz Ridenour:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Ridenour

She is a total intellectual prostitute for the anti global warming agenda, takes a shitload of tax-free "educational" funding from the likes of Exxon Mobil and the Scaife Foundations, which is publicly available knowledge (but not from the Trilateral Commission as far as I know, sorry to disappoint your puerile cheap shot to paint anyone with a different opinion than you as a conspiracy theorist), to pay herself a salary that last I checked, several years ago, was north of $200,000 a year for a ridiculously easy and worthless job and allowed her and her employee husband, whom she also pays a salary out of these tax-free donations, to live on a lovely cul-de-sac near Washington D.C., and who also totally prostituted herself to the tobacco companies' deceptive propaganda campaign, as exposed by Mike Ceresi et al during the great tobacco litigation, before that ran dry and she had to make the switcheroo to brainwashing the gullible into thinking there's any possible scientific doubt about the reality of global warming. (You have to search under "Amy Moritz" for her work during her tobacco company whore days since that was before she got married.)

As you'll notice from her Wikipedia page she's also been involved and questioned in various Jack Abramoff schemes and other scandals which I didn't bother to mention before since they're not as important as the overarching evil of her intellectual prostitution to the anti global warming propaganda campaign.

As for doing "research in the past", actually I didn't just spend five seconds on Google, I found the single most significant piece of actual scientific evidence Ridenour had ever cited in her rants, actually from a peer-reviewed scientific journal, quite the rarity in her oeuvre, about a single time series of temperature measurements in Antarctica that had gone down over time, and I went to a conference in Chicago and personally met and talked with the lead investigator scientist from that paper and asked him about it in person, and he told me his temperature recordings had been going up everywhere he had been measuring in Antarctica except for one location that had had one temporary downward dip and he was tired of how often he'd been outraged to be contacted by national media outlets who had been told his research hinted that global warming wasn't true. And I confronted Amy with this fact, and she totally backpedaled and made moronically lame excuses about the one closest thing to actual scientific evidence she had ever produced in her entire career in intellectual whoredom.

So as for the propagandists involved being morons, that's just my personal experience dealing with people like Amy so I don't have a citation for those dealings, but her Wikipedia page is also a great place to start for anyone else wanting to get a sense of her moronitude, and a more extensive analysis of her life's work will reward any curious student with an exploding brain in response to the depraved depths of moronitude to be found. As for references I don't really give a shit and you can take over from here if you actually care about learning true facts about your world, i.e. it's left as an exercise for the student, because I got burned out on all this shit a few years ago after trying to deal with the total wreckage of the Bush Administration for a few years.

And FYI I was shocked to see how much of every single Republican congressperson's written and spoken commentary about global warming came absolutely VERBATIM from Ridenour and other fellow absolute moron prostitutes like her, and I'm sure that hasn't changed or if anything is worse than ever. And this total bullshit was the best these members of congress could come up with to make excuses to do nothing about global warming. Spend a little time thinking about that.

As for my actual position, I'm left-wing enough to hold the same position as that radical left-wing rag The Economist in accepting the scientific reality of global warming and that we have uncertainty about its coming effects but that uncertainty is reason to do more, not less, to understand and mitigate its efforts, in the same way that uncertainty about whether your house might possibly ever catch fire is not a good reason to refuse ever to spend a dime on homeowners' insurance.

And as for where to place blame, I have to have some pity on Amy who managed to find a way to make a really good living despite being a moron, i.e. exactly the same basis for pity I have for most members of congress, but I ascribe more moral failing to smarter people who don't do enough personal intellectual due diligence of their own to filter the bullshit from their dumber fellow humans, and I hope and expect Hacker News users to be smarter than members of congress not named Rush Holt and certainly smarter than those who make their living whoring for the more evil members of congress.

And if Ridenour or whoever else in the Republican intellectual whore wasteland wants to try to sue me for defamation or some other stupid bullshit now, she has more than enough information to find me and that is a fight that I would win and that would absolutely fill me with delight.