TRUTH.
In order for there to be some sort of scientific conspiracy driving some political agenda, it would require so much expense as you say and pretty much impossible to perpetrate consistently. Science is founded on finding truth. Not falsehoods. While some theories end up wrong, vast majority are correct. The one-sided limited response venues of conspiracies pester science like never before. It’s a real shame how fractured societies are becoming over this. The reactive nature of society seems to call for major calamities for the determination of truth, but even now disinfo is so strong that the obvious climate change conditions are STILL being rebuffed with ridiculous falsehoods like “poor forest management.” People of notoriety speaking out of sheer ignorance with the bravado of extreme confidence deludes the gullible masses.
Wellp, there doesn’t have to be any concerted “conspiracy” for science to become politically-driven.
“Money goes where it’s treated best.”
If you have your own theory that “climate change” is based more on sunspots than hyu-mons burning coal, etc., and want to put that to the test, no one’s going to fund you.
If you want a study to prove that 146 varieties of endangered lichen on remote mountaintops around the world will die out as a direct result of “global warming”, people will throw money at you to do it.
So if you want money to do research, and make your mortgage payments, you pick which studies will rake in the bux.
You don’t open an adult bookstore in Amishtown, y’know? Unless you want to go out of business and take the tax write-off or something.
And let’s face it, anyone wanting to show global warming climate change is not purely manmade, is going to be looked at as a “climate assassin”, someone wanting your kids and grandkids to live in a burned-out husk of a planet. Might as well blow secondhand smoke in babies’ faces.
LB, let me get this straight. Are you saying that money only goes to man made climate change pushers? If so, why would that be? My guess is the fossil fuel industries has the most money to throw at studies like the video back a few posts. That guy has taken millions from Koch. I don’t research this personally but defer to the scientific community to do that for me.
I’m not saying “only”, but there’s a fairly good chance. Being that it’s “politically expedient” to do so, sure, funding would be way more likely than trying to prove the opposite.
If you’re a reporter throwing hardball questions to your mayor, what do you think your chances would be to get asked to (or allowed into) the next press conference, vs a reporter that lobs those nice softball questions that make him look good.
Again, there doesn’t have to be any conspiracy involved, certainly no membership cards or non-disclosure agreements, but just an awareness of (as mentioned) knowing who butters your bread. Anyone in the industry who’s remotely savvy will know that.
If I worked at a company with a dimwit boss, and always called him out on his dumb-ass decisions, my career-options would be quite limited. On the other hand, if I did my job regardless and even let him take the credit, though I did the exact opposite of what he told me to do, you’d better believe I’d advance faster.
Added: There doesn’t have to be any Grand Conspiracy at the company, just a lick of common sense and political savvy.
I am not getting who the funding money is coming from and what motive they might have to be pushing this theory. Again, it looks to me the existing energy tycoons have the most to gain by funding a few dissenting voices to muddy the waters. Similar to what the tobacco industry did years ago.
Those industries are behind people like Willie Soon et al. Fortunately, money alone doesn’t make results from any research look plausible where it’s plain wrong. Tobacco industry tried and failed, too.
Universities are the recipients of the research money. But who is supplying the money worldwide to study man made climate change? I don’t see any incentive for the government to fund these studies. I do see incentive for disinformation by the fossil fuel industry though. That is my take anyway. The greenhouse effect was 9th grade science back in the 70s before lobbyist dollars turned it political.
Yet if you look at the post I made on the first page, the “science” as shown in headlines of the 1970’s clearly said we were in the grips of the next ice age. Yet interestingly enough, I agree 100% with what you say here until you get to your last (I bolded that part) sentence which as my earlier post shows, isn’t accurate.
As I said before I don’t research this subject much. Correct me if I am wrong but global warming and a new ice age are not exclusive of each other. If the Atlantic currents are changed Europe’s temperature will drop. A whole slew of contradictory results. Deserts will form. Extreme storms. Extreme droughts. Here is an article from MIT with more info than I can remember.
I really can’t wrap my head around the logic in thinking that human-caused climate change is being exaggerated/falsified for economic reasons, while the price of oil being absolutely essential to the US Dollar - and therefore a huge portion of the world’s economic activity - is completely ignored. That seems like a much larger incentive than the pittance of research grants, etc. that is spent on climate change.
I don’t believe there are any climate scientists who claim that 100% of climate change is due only to human causes.
I also think that people with money most often don’t want to waste it. I think it is more difficult to get funding for research testing a hypothesis with no data behind it, as opposed to getting funding for research for testing a hypothesis that has a grounding in existing evidence, because people would rather not spend their money on attempts to prove things not based on facts, or attempts to disprove what is already proven repeatedly, and with a lot of evidence.
For example, would you expect a proposed study attempting to prove that nicotine is not addictive to get funded easily? Or a study trying to prove that cancer can be caused by thoughts that one might get cancer?
It isn’t true that good research proposals based on facts cannot get funding if not proposed by people with connections. Certainly, as in any endeavor, getting funding is easier if one has connections to people with money. But I hear often of research proposals from children’s experiments at science fairs getting funding from people with money who know a good idea when they see one. Similarly, grant proposals are often evaluated in a formal way, with strict protocols intended to weed out bias. The evaluators are not allowed to know where the proposals come from.
I think there is some bias in some environmental/earth science research funding, with regard to which projects get funding and which do not, but the bias has to do with which experiments have a faster and easier payoff for the researchers and for the field scientists who would apply the research. Similarly, in medical research, the funding tends to go to research with a faster and easier payoff. The other diseases get left behind in funding. What follows is predictable, in environmental research and in medical research: if you can see the problem or disease in a microscope and see easily whether your proposed treatment works, it is more likely to get funded. In contrast, if we don’t yet have the technology to see the specific environmental problem or disease, and/or if seeing and quantifying the effects of the tested treatment is more difficult, it is less likely to get funded. In addition, it follows that it is easier to get funding for an experiment of a quick fix of a problem than to get funding for an experiment that is only one of a long, time-consuming series of experiments that would be needed to some day, in the distant future, lead to a fix or cure.