So are you saying that the field of climate science in particular has not been subject to massive funding and research grants over the past 20 years? Do you have any idea how much money has been flushed into this area?
Oh noes, {Admiral Ackbar voice}IT'S A TRAP!!!{/Admiral Ackbar voice}.
This has already been dealt with. How exactly do you think research grants work, that some guy writes a few equations and personally receives twenty grand for his efforts?
Here's what happens:
Dr/Professor X submits a research proposal to a research council, including anticipated costs. Said research council reviews the request, judges the merit of the proposal and so on, and, in some (by no means all) cases awards a grant.
Now, let's have a look at those costs:
Firstly, you need research staff. Often you're going to have to hire postdoctoral research assistants (that is, PhD graduates who don't currently hold a lecturship or reader position in another institution) with the required specialisms from outside of your department. Say the research requires two assistants for a two year period. That alone will cost anywhere between £100,000 to £200,000. Now, if you're handling vast amounts of data requiring specialist coding or programming skills, or lab work, you also need a technician to help out with that, which might bump the figure up another £50,000 for the two year period. Ok, so that's quarter of a million just employing three other people for the duration of the project, then you might take into account travel costs if you're collaborating with other academics across the world, or use specialist facilities (which is likely to cost more money). Then there's a question of what equipment is needed, and so on and so on.
So, after all that, how much money does the scientist who submitted the actual grant application get? Nothing, zilch, not a bean. He or she gets paid their usual wage by whatever institute they are a member of, and contrary to what some people might think, the wages in academia aren't brilliant compared with similarly qualified professionals or those working in private industry (which is the whole damn reason that the UK suffers from academics and scientists either migrating into the private sector or other countries).
This kind of nonsense argument about funding wouldn't even be so bad, but the funding for climate science isn't even that amazing! For instance, a cursory glance at the funding council's websites shows that the director of the CRU recently received a grant for £132,000 (spread across three years). Ooh! That's a lot of money, there must be something fishy there, eh? But wait! A researcher at Oxford was recently awarded £348,155, almost double the previous figure, for a project called "Icons and Innovation in South West China's Religious Texts". Go on then, what nefarious government scheme to enslave and dupe us all is that money funding then? What's more is that this is pretty much peanuts compared with what medical, biomedical, and pharmaceutical research pulls in, where awards are often in terms of millions rather than hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Research is expensive, that's the bottom line of it. I've seen some cretins fizzing at the mouth about how Professor Jones has received something like £13,000,000 in grants over the past 19 or 20 years. Sounds like a lot, until you realise that the university of Bristol's maths department goes through more than that in one year, even with maths being one of the cheaper sciences when it comes to research funding.
It's something of a moot point anyway (as I said no one personally gains financially from research money). Nevertheless, when you have seen these figures about research funding and so forth, did you never once think "hm. I wonder where that money goes, what can it be for, and am I really sure that it's such a lot of money compared with how much might get pumped into other disciplines?" before leaping to the conclusion that it was a clear indication of skullduggery?
So you can't answer the funding / carbon trading questions then?
