Perhaps people are either tired of discussing or too embarrassed to discuss the problems of Obamacare, so the cultural conversation is returning to debate climate change. Advocates intone that 97% of peer-reviewed research demonstrates that man-made climate change is a fact. They then assume that there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists, and that it is imperative we do something to save the planet from ourselves.
All this sounds reasonable until you know how the climate research game is played. Climate change advocates either remain willfully ignorant of how climate research is done, or they know the intentionally political nature of this research and deliberately hide it. If you don’t understand how the research game is played, you, too, will be duped by these arguments, and will blithely sit while leftist idealists armed with “scientific facts” from comrades in white lab coats rip away what vestiges of freedom we have left in this country.
I have worked in academia among professors at Georgia Tech and many other research institutions for twenty years and I know the game. Major universities pay their professors to teach and do research. However, you probably didn’t know that while research is a major part of a professor’s job, universities typically don’t pay for the actual research that they do. It is up to each professor to get their own funding to get lab space, buy equipment, and hire grad students to help them do their research. If a professor does not publish enough peer-reviewed research within the first 5-7 years after they are hired, they will not get tenure and they will probably be out of a job. Successful professors at major research universities spend more time raising money to do research than actually doing research. They are professional fund raisers before they are researchers.
Now, if you are a chemical engineer or physicist, for instance, you have many funding options available to you. There are government agencies to which you may submit a grant proposal to fund your research. There are many foundations interested in these areas. More often, though, private companies like Kimberly-Clark, Intel, or Dow will fund university researchers to make major new advances in science because it benefits the company. It is often cheaper for these companies than doing the research in their in-house labs.
However, when it comes to climate research, there is little benefit for foundations and companies to research the weather. So, almost all climate research funding comes from various government agencies. All of these agencies are ideologically driven. If you submit a grant proposal that aims to demonstrate the veracity of man-made climate change, there may be a big check in your future. If you submit a grant proposal that intends to disprove man-made climate change, you and your research group will go out of business because you won’t get funding.
The next time someone says to you that 97% of peer-reviewed research proves that climate change is real, wake them up! Just reply, “Are you really that stupid?” and explain how the climate research game is played. It is a cleverly disguised ideological hustle, so don’t fall for it.
Is climate change real? Of course! The climate changes all the time. Do humans have anything to do with it? Not likely. If you talk to meteorologists (I know a few) who work with the weather every day, many are not convinced at all. However, professional meteorologists don’t do much peer-reviewed research. They are busy working with the weather. It is university climate scientists who do most of the published research. If you know anything about university professors (I have written an Oxford University dissertation on the topic), they are overwhelmingly left-leaning politically, and the vast majority are registered Democrats. Climate science research is done by almost exclusively ideological liberals funded completely by ideological liberals to produce “results” that prove liberal ideology.
If the sole source of climate research funding were not government agencies, I may be more willing to accept its conclusions. But I know too much about the climate research game to know better. Unlike most any other area of scientific research, climate science is thoroughly skewed, tainted, and politicized because the only way to get funding is from an ideological government agency. This spills over into other sciences, too. I may be a biological researcher studying the mating habits of the Eastern Gray Squirrel. It is not easy to get funding for this kind of research from a foundation or company. However, if I write a government grant proposing to research the impact of climate change on the mating habits of the Eastern Gray Squirrel, I’ll get my grant.
The “97% of peer-reviewed research” claim only tells us that 97% of government funded research supports the government and U.N.’s liberal ideological ends. Show me a large body of climate research funded by a non-ideological source that demonstrates man-made climate change, then let’s talk. The “scientific consensus” that climate alarmists claim does not exist. There are thousands of working scientists who don’t buy the mantra. See the Petition Project (www.petitionproject.org) for just one list of them.