Science has always had a strange relationship with politics; scientific discoveries are useful to the government only when they bolster its position somehow, and are shut down at the first signs of a threat.
So, if you're developing nuclear or biological weapons, even under the innocuous guise of space exploration or somesuch, then you're golden. As SOON as you start contradicting the party line, off with you. US scientists are fortunate that when THAT happens they're merely unfunded and ignored, as opposed to, say, Soviet scientists that were jailed and executed.
That being said... how can scientists influence candidates, anyway? I suppose what Nature editors mean is good ol' lobbying. After all, it's the oil industry lobby that's fighting the climate change research, and the evangelical Christian lobby that's fighting the stem cell research. So why not have a scientific lobby that'll fight all those other lobbies?
Though the movement conservitives may seem all over the map on science issues, there is a consistent thread through them all. They believe scientific evidence is just another opinion, no more valid than the opinion of a pundit or preacher. They believe you can trust your gut whether to believe something or not. Look at their opinions on scientific issues with the realization that they rely on what feels right, and they start to look consistent.
Climate change cash penalties are a purely free lunch phenomena. A prominent Russian scientist believes the present warm solar cycle will start waning in several years time, and soon and we could all see a trend toward cooler temperatures for some time. If that does happen, will the political yahoos all be against global cooling? The climate is a big complicated cause and effect system, just ask the wooly mammoth and all the other animals that went extinct several thousand years ago at the end of the last ice age. One thing is certain, over geologic time the climate is not static but continually warms up and cools off.
science is based on data. The only thing most scientists really believe in is the scientific method. You know - that boring hypothesize, test, conclude cycle. The tests produce data either supporting, disproving, or inconclusive regarding the hypothesis. As for "believing in" facts, that is pretty situational.
Most of us normally "believe in" newtonian mechanics. Except in really big, small, or fast realms. For a scientist, believing in a thing means that that thing can predict an outcome. It doesn't mean that the thing is true because science is all about finding when and where the predictions don't match experiment.
Until he got set up at PIAS, Einstein like many a scientist of his day wondered if he'd be able to pay the family bills, hence his flitting about globe in the late 1920's and early 1930's looking for a better financial deal.
Political developments in Germany made one decision for him anyway. He wasn't greedy though, his humble final home at Princeton is testimony to this. Probably the greatest mind of the last 100 years wasn't arrogant enough to say that any theory was unequivocal, including his own.
Predicting what the weather is going to be like exactly in 200 years is probably as easy as reasoning out a unified field theory that also eliminates quantum uncertainty. The earth's been warming up for the last 10-15 millenia, it'll probably keep on keeping on for some time. Uniformitarianism or punctuated equilibrium, it's all good.