Yeah, I meant "falsely equated" (I was thinking of the logical fallacy called "equivocation" while I was typing and my brain betrayed me...!)

I think we agree then that it's the process that matters. It will forever be impossible to separate the implications of scientific assessments from politics; after all, many scientific conclusions bear on human behavior, and the process of influencing other people (e.g. their behaviors) is, by definition, "politics". What matters is that we, as thinking people, learn to separate values issues from science issues. A large body of scientific evidence can point to the link between, say, human activity and major changes in climate; but what to _do_ about it is a values issue, and science can't tell us what the subsequent "right" courses of action are - those are based largely on values.