A scientist. Because any aerospace engineer that would lend his name as a source to claim that pigs can fly out of his hindquarters would know full well that there would be a hundred other aerospace engineers - as well as a few proctologists - that could quickly debunk that idea.
That scientists would never be taken seriously again because he grossly violated the ethical principles of the field.
Fortunately nasty letters from people that don't really know the subject matter don't tend to mean much to scientists. As for getting fired I'll point out that no one - and I mean no one - gets their PhD for the money. It takes way too many years and way too much money with too few ever making it unto the upper-middle class bracket. You don't get into science for the money. Only a fool would do so and those types of scientists don't last very long because this is the type of work where you have to love the field, you have to love the subject matter so much that you feel a deep need to do it.
It's rarely ever about the money. For those that do strike it rich it's often through some spectacular discovery or even blind luck.
"Animal X evolved from the dinosaurs" is one of those things that are supported with mountains of evidence. Just because you only get a few paragraphs in an article doesn't mean that paleontologists just came up with the idea over a weekend.
As for your second point, don't use the history channel as an example. There is no inferring entire civilizations from single clay fragments. Archeology takes years, often a decade or more, to come to conclusions and they do it based on their own mountains of evidence. Just because you're seeing some clever editing of a documentary processed down to 40 minutes for easy consumption doesn't mean you've seen any actual science presented.
Only it doesn't work that way. One scientists isn't examining these ice cores. Not even one team of scientists nor even one organization. Not even one nation! Various groups of scientists are examining evidence independently, submitting conclusions, taking each others conclusions and testing them, applying their own knowledge and skill sets to uncovering the truth behind the data. This process gets repeated time and time and time and time and time and time and time again until one scientist has looked at dozens, if not hundreds, of core samples and each of those core samples have been examined by dozens, if not hundreds, of scientists.
Then begins the quality control. Then articles are submitted for review and are picked apart by even more scientists not only from within the same field but from other related fields. Then they're picked apart by researchers at other universities, even picked apart by graduate students. The submitted reports are scrutinized and poked and prodded with every conceivable method of testing possible with current technology.
And then, after all that, if the reports haven't been completely debunked by other conflicting reports...then it can be shown to the laymen that don't know correlation != causation yet understand that the scientists presenting them the data do know, and those presenters take that into account when analyzing their data in order to figure out that causation.
We get into these messes when the scientific method is thrown out the window. We get into these messes when people come up with conspiracy theories that scientists are just in it for themselves, just trying to suck money out of the research kitty.
Let me make something clear. If global warming was not a problem, every single scientist working on it would still have a job. We would still have people examining the climate. We'd have a lot less of them as there have been a lot of people getting into the relative fields in recent years because it's such a hot topic (no pun intended
).But if it weren't a problem those geologists, climatologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, meteorologists and -ologists from every other field would still have other subjects to work on so there is not desire among scientists to exaggerate the problem in order to keep the research money going. It simply doesn't work that way. If a scientist is claiming that the problem is a hell of a lot worse than everyone else thinks it is the most likely reason is that the data he's seen has actually brought him to that conclusion. It's silly to think that he's just making sure he's got job security and absolutely ridiculous to claim that two thousand scientists, most of them completely independent from one another, are all in cahoots to do the same thing.
