>What is scientific about the global warming studies? It is merely conjecture by a group of renegade quasi-scientists looking for funding for their research.

Hardly. Virtual all Earth Scientists think the planet is warming and that human activity has something to do with it:

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf

The gist of this study is that while only 52% of Americans think there's consensus about global warming among experts, in fact in this study of Earth scientists, 90% agreed that there is global warming and 82% say that
human activity is a controlling factor. Fewer than 10% said humans have no role in global warming (the rest choose "I'm not sure")

Full disclosure: this was a self-selecting study. Invitations weresent to 10,000+ identified Earth scientists (essentially, all the Earth Scientists in the US); about 30% chose to participate. It was done in a way that kept participants anonymous, so no issues with facing embarrassment.

The real issue is that providing both sides of an issue has been so beaten into the media that they've presented this topic as if there is real scientific disagreement, which is not the case.

Tamar