It's the end of the world as we know it

Russell Roberts at Cafe Hayek commented on an article from the Guardian:

· Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown disease to emerge.

That is not science. That's scare-mongering. Or wild-guessing. Or something else. But it's not science. Is that from the journalist or the report? Alas, it's more or less from the report. Here's how the press release words it:

The degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century and is a barrier to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals. In all the four plausible futures explored by the scientists, they project progress in eliminating hunger, but at far slower rates than needed to halve number of people suffering from hunger by 2015. Experts warn that changes in ecosystems such as deforestation influence the abundance of human pathogens such as malaria and cholera, as well as the risk of emergence of new diseases. Malaria, for example, accounts for 11 percent of the disease burden in Africa and had it been eliminated 35 years ago, the continent’s gross domestic product would have increased by $100 billion.

When you read the actual press release rather than the news story, you realize that we've left the realm of science and are somewhere else.
[...]
Water could be a problem down the road. It's a problem now around the world due to poorly run thugocracies around the world, but that's not what the report is referring to. The world's fisheries are probably mismanaged. But where's the evidence that we're standing on the edge of a precipice? There isn't any.

I plan to sleep well tonight, though I am worried about the state of science.

Have we politicized environmental research to the point where political decisions decide the results of scientific study, instead of the other way around?