People don't assume that academics have neutral funding sources. That's why many will always look at the potential for conflict of interest, and look more carefully into the why. An academic in a university research body will get loads of funding from private foundations and industry. Even when it's not helpfully labelled as the Microsoft Campus, Oxford University. Who knows, I might be suspicious of some work coming out of there that is reporting a result that happens to be in Microsoft's interests.
Given they supposedly have to find change to keep their jobs, how is it that all the research around the world is pointing to similar changes? If they're just making shit up, I'd expect predictions all over the map.
The days of constraint free government funding for Blue Skies research are long gone. The world is far worse off as a result. That doesn't mean every single project, from every source is now corrupt. It does mean that some projects and studies do indeed have an agenda.
Offer some evidence that academia is entirely corrupt. Or worse than industry.
The CRU's current About Us includes:
"sponsored by contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry"
To me that is not proof of "gets its funding from governments". It's one of multiple sources of funding. Regardless of how much you want to paint them as some government funded state puppet.
Yet even then I fail to see how that helps your cause célèbre, the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil. If the CRU were as corrupt as you keep claiming, the climate unit would surely be busy proving how harmless petrol and gas are, to get more of that filthy Conservative government lucre.
We're not going to reach agreement, thanks for the conversation. :)
The Climategate docs had a spreadsheet with funding sources. So that's quite old now, but back then it was about £13 million from various sources, all of which were the government. I suppose they probably do get a bit of funding from non-government sources, but it seems it isn't likely to be much.
It shows Professor Jones, along with other academics at the university, received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, Nato, and the US department of energy. Several British bodies also gave substantial sums including the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority and the Department for the Environment.
Perhaps this article doesn't list any private sector grantees, but there are plenty of government bodies to go around.
Re: everyone getting the same results, is academia corrupt.
The research around the world doesn't agree entirely, but it's pretty close. However, it's all based on the same datasets. There are only a few temperature datasets available, really only two major datasets and one is maintained by the CRU. It's really an incredibly influential organisation, which is presumably why someone hacked it and why it was such a splash.
Now, if the temperature record is unreliable all climate research based on that record is also unreliable. You can't argue the world is getting warmer unless you can reliably measure temperatures, that's pretty basic.
Unfortunately we know for sure the temperature record must be unreliable, because the historical temperature dataset scientists use (which goes back to about 1850) keeps being revised. If you use the dataset that was current in the 1990s, then compare the dataset to the ones being provided today, you can see that the historical temperatures have been changed.
This isn't done entirely secretly; the idea is that thermometer readings have to be adjusted to take into effect various confounding factors and that's perfectly legitimate. But there are practical problems:
1. People have been measuring temperatures with thermometers for over a century, yet scientists are still changing how they adjust the raw data today, with the result that the official temperatures seen back in the 30s and 40s, or even earlier, are still changing. The results of the adjustments are massive and fundamentally change the conclusions of the science. But by logical implication, if modern scientists are actually correct to do these adjustments then all previous analyses of the climate made until now must have been wrong. Why is nobody alerting the world to the prior wrongness of climate datasets?
2. Temperature dataset creators like the CRU have a nasty habit of claiming they destroyed or "lost" the raw, unadjusted data. They have also fought very strongly to block the release of raw datasets, and engaged in other sorts of behaviour that scientists aren't meant to engage in. That is, the only datasets available are those that have been "retouched" by people who get multi-million pound budgets because of predictions of warming.
This large conflict of interest requires enormous trust in the climate scientists. It is thus unfortunate that revisions of historical data always create warming effects where previously none existed. The apparent pause in rising temperatures was discussed by scientists for many years - the latest temperature datasets from CRU rewrite history and erase it entirely.
So you have to understand that climate skeptics are entirely understandable. Their positions aren't weird or crazy. Climate scientists are asking the world for staggeringly huge amounts of trust: to trust them about their understanding of climate trends although they're simultaneously claiming that all recorded temperature data, even as recently as 10 years ago, was wrong.
This graphic illustrates the kind of thing that happens:
I'll not go too far into CRU, as I have no definitive proof of their funding beyond what is publicly known.
I can't imagine why the Met Office or NRA would have any interest in promoting research with an agenda. They want to forecast the weather accurately, and manage UK rivers respectively. Their interests are served by accuracy, not agenda and incorrect data. DOE was abolished by the Tories which you might well think reveals their stance.
Talking of, the Telegraph piece you link is after they stopped being a reputable newspaper with a rightwing but honest perspective, but were well along their journey to rightwing bullshit comic of today (ie after the Barclay brothers bought them). Which is a damn shame as I once used to buy Telegraph, FT and Guardian to get the spread of perspective. There isn't much available for honesty on the right from UK newspapers now. Which is not to discredit your link, I simply do not know. They still hadn't quite ditched all pretence to honesty around then. :)
> did you notice Theresa May's last act
lol. OK, I'll bite. The last act of a leader, as a "fuck you" to whoever might follow, after presiding over a famously weak government, coming shortly after the cross-party Select Committee's detailed plan to decarbonise. Greenwashing that was entirely empty words and the sound of kicking the can down the road. As significant as Boris Johnson's "I will lie in front of Heathrow bulldozers" speech. What legislation was brought to require movement towards her very distant targets?
What have the Conservative government done towards meeting that target since? What policy have they? Hint: nowt beyond the vague "so far in the future we don't care at all" target.
On other climate, renewables and efficiency related bills, the Conservatives have very consistently voted them down. They ended onshore wind completely, they removed feed tariffs for home solar - initially with no plan for replacement causing a 90%+ reduction in installations and decimating the industry, approved the Heathrow expansion, approved and promoted fracking - though even their own party membership objected to this so they wound it back somewhat, voted down the climate targets (two or three times), voted down the vehicle emission limits. It goes on, and on. You found one speech with nice words.
Also note that it was Parliament, not the Conservative Government that declared a climate emergency.
Given they supposedly have to find change to keep their jobs, how is it that all the research around the world is pointing to similar changes? If they're just making shit up, I'd expect predictions all over the map.
The days of constraint free government funding for Blue Skies research are long gone. The world is far worse off as a result. That doesn't mean every single project, from every source is now corrupt. It does mean that some projects and studies do indeed have an agenda.
Offer some evidence that academia is entirely corrupt. Or worse than industry.
The CRU's current About Us includes:
"sponsored by contracts and grants from academic funding councils, government departments, intergovernmental agencies, charitable foundations, non-governmental organisations, commerce and industry"
To me that is not proof of "gets its funding from governments". It's one of multiple sources of funding. Regardless of how much you want to paint them as some government funded state puppet.
Yet even then I fail to see how that helps your cause célèbre, the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil. If the CRU were as corrupt as you keep claiming, the climate unit would surely be busy proving how harmless petrol and gas are, to get more of that filthy Conservative government lucre.
We're not going to reach agreement, thanks for the conversation. :)