>To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers. Yeah, this is almost entirely wrong. I'm sure there is sligh

>To the average person, myself included, both "sides" have a profit motive in fudging the numbers. Yeah, this is almost entirely wrong. I'm sure there is slightly more public funding available in the Earth sciences because of the urgency of climate change, but not much- NSF funds for Earth science projects have been pretty steady for the last 20 years [0] and before that too. If climate change simply didn't exist, researchers would just get grants to work on the plethora of other important Earth science issues- human water usage, the ozone layer, ocean acidification, forest fires, coral bleaching, agricultural runoff, glacier retreat. There was no shortage of important Earth science problems- why on Earth would researchers go to such (impossible) lengths to fabricate one? The idea that international researchers have created some conspiracy to increase funding in their field is bizarre and incoherent and just demonstrates a lack of understanding of how science funding works. It also doesn't explain the international consensus on climate change- how has every major scientific organization and metereological society agreed upon it, when all of them have completely different funding situations? And if they have, well then surely they would have realized that this plan has not drastically increased their public funding in 20 years and given up on it by now! But in all seriousness, this idea is just insulting to the scientists and the fact that it's popular amongst American conservatives is pretty telling of how scientifically ignorant that ideology is. [0] https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/CJS%20NSF%2015hc.jpg https://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files/CJS%20NSF%2015hc.jp...