Respectfully, if you cannot envision the connections between scientific fraud as a business model and science-branded fashion pressure as a political agenda, I may not be the best qualified to spell them out for you.
As much my thing as stating the obvious tends to be, there are some things so painfully obvious it feels rather like lowering myself to explain them to an apparent adult.
But I can at least point out that both involve a sort of bait-and-switch tactic: plagiarism, in any field, offers as its bait the assurance that an author is the originator of a given set of contents, and then switches to someone else’s work in order to imply substance to the claim. Whereas, the bait of “climate science” is the assurance of a problem of climatic behavior by means of making claims about what has been observed by “scientific” means, while the switch is the broad and unarticulated presumption that to observe a problem is to be in possession of both a defensible explanation of its causes, as well as a singular solution to it.
Owing to the vast political capital behind the ability to accuse anyone of “climate denialism” as a catchall conversation-ender, those claiming a scientific basis for a programmatic agenda are not required to “photoshop climate data” in order to pass observations about the past off as assurances about the future. Implied solutions to climate’s behavior need not be photoshopped, because they do not even exist. Regardless of how soundly scientific anyone’s observations of climate may be, it is a complete departure from anything resembling science to make the additional simultaneous claims that the causes of the problems are fully known, and the solutions to them fully implementable. Thus, this current “climate debate” is no such thing at all: it is a political fashion statement which implies by pure arrogant posturing that one thing is also two other things.
If one regards the plagiarizing of scientific data as an ethical compromise, it seems obvious enough to me that promoting data as something far more than what it really is (a set of observations) is a similar ethical compromise, and one of vastly more potential harm to accept on face value.
