State of Confusion

I have just finished reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton. It's a book about climate change, full of scientific references, just right for science geeks like me. In the book, he dismissed global warming as a fabricated hoax and backed up his claims with scientific papers and graphs. It left me feeling that the things we were taught in geography classes were not true. So I went on to the net and did some research. I found that there were many webpages criticising the book for cherrypicking the data from scientific papers in order to substantiate his claims. It left me very confued because Crichton in his book also accused the scientific community of cherrypicking data to show signs of global warming. I feel that the integrity of scientific data is compromised in many cases, either because of financial pressure or the researcher's expectations. Even while doing lab reports, I am prone to skewing my data in order to favour my hypothesis. I don't believe that top scientists have so much more integrity than me as to resist the temptations of changing unfavourable data. Hence, it is really difficult to know what really is the truth. Are the things taught in our textbooks really true? Global warming has been taught to us since our prmary school days as a fact when there's so much contradicting data. How are we supposed to know what the situation really is when all the supposed facts are fed to us by higher authorities. I am really confused as to what education is. Is it for us to enrich ourselves or for the beauracrats to infuse propaganda into our minds?