Starvation of funding, that is.
This according to today's National Post:
... future Canadian studies on adaptation to the consequences of global warming are in jeopardy because they are being starved of funding, warns the head of a major research foundation.
Since 2000, the Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences has relied on $110 million in federal grants to fund numerous peer-reviewed studies at universities.
But its requests to the previous Liberal and current Conservative governments for more funding in recent years have fallen on deaf ears.
"We haven't been able to fund anything new since July of last year, no matter how compelling it could be," said Dawn Conway, executive director of the foundation.
If it only gets funded if it's "compelling", doesn't this tempt competing climate professionals to inflate their claims? How can we depend on groups like this to provide dispassionate information? Certainly in the press the claims have become ever-more intense until they have begun to sound less like science and more like scaremongering.
8 comments:
Hi RK,
Look, I know Crichton said so, and all... but does it really make sense that the made-up fear of the Global Warming is strong enough for that much funding?
Why don´t other catastrophic theories have the same attention?
Does it really make sense that the economic power would be on the side of a theory that tries to convince people to consume LESS?
Oh yes, and Happy Easter!
There's tons of funding to be had and money to be made -- but it's all contingent upon coming up with a scenario that is alarming. "The temperature may rise by a degree or two, but the effects should be easily adapted to" is not going to get you gobs of money.
Remember Al Gore's quote, about how it's hard to accept a fact when your livelihood depends on not seeing it? This cuts both ways.
Does it make sense? Yes, if you are a guilt-ridden anti-western development type that wants to concentrate and amass more power in the hands of governments and bureaucrats. Big governments absolutely depend on creating a populace that needs them and acquiesces to be controlled by them.
Happy Easter to you too!
Here's a tidbit from Newsweek: April 15, 2007.
"Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation.
Guesses and assumptions are worth something; but they are not hard science in the classical sense at least; they're not tree rings or ice cores!
Look on which side the money is:
"Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." The Guardian, Feb 2nd, 2007.
Here´s the link for the whole article:
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2004397,00.html#article_continue
If true, that's one think-tank vs. the combined funding power of most if not all western governments of the world, along with the power of a complicit media. (Last night Canadians had to endure a CBC presentation "Can the Earth be Saved").
And, if this is science, the results should stand or fall on their own merits. Either scientists use assumptions and "we think" factors, or they don't.
The whole thing would benefit from being put under an intense searchlight -- and this is not happening because it's become a bandwagon to be on.
Plus, you are quoting from the Guardian. Yikes!
Please DO post something that shows governments concerned or acting because of this.
About the Guardian... I´m sorry, I´ll look for some website with Marvin the Martian on it... or some novelist with some fiction-conspiracy. That´s more reliable!
ouch. Ouch. Ouch!
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