Since I don't live in the USA, I don't have a feeling for the current political climate [pun intended] there, so take the following remark with a grain of salt.
But if I go by my gut feeling, I'd say that there is a difference between wanting to understand by what and how much the climate is influenced by various factors (as unpolitical as possible in this academic discipline) vs having a political stance which policy measures to take based on these insights (e.g.
- do nothing and tolerate the possible risks
- lobby for strongly reducing CO2 emissions
- lobby for doing geoengineering to stop the climate change
). My feeling is that at least some climate scientists want to be both researchers and "politicians" for their academic discipline.
Since I don't live in the USA, I don't have a feeling for the current political climate [pun intended] there, so take the following remark with a grain of salt.
But if I go by my gut feeling, I'd say that there is a difference between wanting to understand by what and how much the climate is influenced by various factors (as unpolitical as possible in this academic discipline) vs having a political stance which policy measures to take based on these insights (e.g.
- do nothing and tolerate the possible risks
- lobby for strongly reducing CO2 emissions
- lobby for doing geoengineering to stop the climate change
). My feeling is that at least some climate scientists want to be both researchers and "politicians" for their academic discipline.