Bishop Hill Big bucks
Feb 15, 2012 Climate: other Greens A few days ago, a blog called "Not a lot of people know that" published the results of an FOI round-robin, which sought to determine how much the UK was spending on climate research. The results were as follows:
I can...reveal that, during the financial year 2009/10 (the most recent for which the data is available), Research Council spending on “climate change research and training” amounted to £234 million. This analysis was provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of Research Councils UK (RCUK).
This figure is a minimum - there is also direct funding from government departments and the EU to the universities to add in.
I can't sum up this situation better than the author of the original post:
Let’s be clear about one thing. This sort of money corrupts. It corrupts both individuals and organisations. Climate research funding is agenda driven, rather than result driven; it exists in large part because climate change is perceived as a problem. Research that attempts to prove otherwise is unlikely to be funded at all and even less likely to attract future grants, while scientists who exaggerate the dangers or effects will have no such problems.
It is time to turn the tap off.
Now, what was it you were saying about Heartland?
Reader Comments (12)
Seems like the problem is worse than we thought.
Sure, the UK climate change fans my have spent $234 million on grants that promote their point of view, but the eeeeevil Heartland Institute spent nearly two-TENTHS of one percent of that amount in promoting climate skepticism. Those monsters.
Conflating money spent to actually do science to money spent to "undermine the IPCC" or "dissuade teachers from teaching science" is a little sneaky don't ya think?
It's also pretty obvious, so good luck with that distraction strategy!
It is amusing to see the AGW advocates comparing the billions in government largesse spent on AGW, to the trivial pittances spent by skeptics.
Proof by assertion. Let me play.
Money corrupts, period. Ergo nothing is real. I'm a banana.
The 1702 people that put their names to the infamous Met Office letter...are presumably well aware of the source of their inflated incomes.
'"We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities....". (etc. etc.)
If ~10 of these people cost a million pounds per year (accounting for their salaries, support, infrastructure, pensions, healthcare, etc.) this is another £170 million of taxes (or debt).
It is clear that the UK is squandering hundreds of millions of dollars on climate research/activism annually.
Not to mention the 'forcing' effect on UK government, and through legislation, industry expenditure. A collective madness in a small island - now where has that happened before?
This courtesy of Tucci78 at WUWT
“Corruption is not the same as conspiracy, you understand. Conspiracy is the act of conniving immorally or illegally with others to get your bread buttered. Corruption is simply knowing which side your bread is already buttered on.”
– L. Neil Smith
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/15/some-notes-on-the-heartland-leak/#comment-893405
I applaud your exposure of the inordinately excessive, approximately 6% of government research funding allocated to environmental research - including tax payers money wasted on such research as food security, sustainable use of natural resources, pollution, human health, and other such misanthropic endeavours.
Although I must point out that you neglect to mention the remaining 94% of the budget.
Some of the other, gravy train riding, research allocations include:
The nearly £760 million squandered on the terminally corrupt and agenda driven engineering and physical sciences.
The £370 million pilfered by greedy scientists to fund their blinkered research into biotechnology and the biological sciences.
Not to mention the £536 million extorted by the medical research council to feed the writhing morass of corrupt scientists conducting experiments into the exaggerated dangers of illness and disease, just to keep themselves in a job and fund their pensions.
The list goes on.
Of course the fact that all of these fields of research are related and continually engage in a mutual feeding frenzy of inter-disciplinary corruption and pension-lining, pseudo-scientific back slapping only goes to reinforce the case for abolishing scientific research altogether.
There are a lot of wrong things with academia, but I do not think that excess funding is one of them.
Although results would be far more interesting if we had an unbiased allocation of funds, less hierarchy and more transparency
A few years ago NERC (natural environment research council) had a budget of £400 million - probably higher now in theis era of austerity. They spend this onn "raising awareness2 of CVAGW and a small range of rather pointless actual experiments (listed here http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/11/paying-for-climate-fraud-when-175.html ). A few years ago their boss, Andrew Thorpe, through the pages of the grauniad, issued a call for sceptics to publicly debate him and when several accepted went into purdah.
So I think at least 90% of that +£400 million should also be added to government funding of the warming scare. I presume there are several other unadmitted government sources (plus the BBC) which would suggest that the government subsidy of warming scare propaganda must be above £1 bn annually, possibly well above.
Is £234 million a lot? Tenured Professors are usually salaried and expected to supervise research and publish some papers. They do not get a cut of grant money in their pay packets - not even climatologists.
So to be objective; How much does £234 M equal when divided among all the researchers? How much do they actually earn from it when all expenses like data collection, and equipment are taken out? I can't imagine those researching climate are any better paid than others in academia.
So is £234 M really a lot? Is it more than medical research gets? More than Physics departments? CERN?
The 'they are in it for the money' argument applied to climate research looks ridiculous unless there is some evidence that researchers in that field are significantly better off than other research academics, and I can see no evidence of that here.