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> If your reasearch $$$ depends on you to keep showing that humans are destroying the climate

Except if you cared about money, it is far easier to sell out and take the money from the industry groups who want to fund research to throw the science into doubt.

Do you have figures on the size of government funding for climate research relative to the size of private funding for climate research?

Federal spending is just shy of twelve billion as of 2014 plus an additional twenty-six billion [0] ,and has likely increased since then. Private funding is harder to measure. I also think there's a case to be made that many people are "integrating backwards", looking for a specific answer and finding the research to justify that. This always happens when an issue is politicized, and this issue is undoubtedly politicized.

[0] https://www.gao.gov/key_issues/climate_change_funding_manage...

Meanwhile in the oil & gas drilling and exploration sector:

> According to market research by IBISWorld, a leading business intelligence firm, the total revenues for the oil and gas drilling sector came to $2 trillion in 2017.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/030915/what-percent...

>total revenues for the oil and gas drilling sector came to $2 trillion in 2017.

And all that money was immediately given to dirty evil fake scientists, right?

Funding is irrelevant to this question, salary is the important part: if the scientist is selling out their principles for personal gain, it's their take home that will matter to them.

There is a LOT of documentation on scientists making a lot more money in private industry than in government sponsored research.

Any examples of high profile climate scientists who have moved on to make a lot of money doing research unrelated to global warming?

Not that I've ever seen. That's the weird part of the original accusation, climate deniers are, almost as a rule, people with degrees in unrelated fields (often education ironically). This "climate advisor" of the original article is a Physics Professor specializing in atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy.

Accusing climate researchers of skewing their results for funding makes no sense when they are ALL on the same side of the argument and that you could make hay in the current adminstration by being on the other side.

Occams razor would lead us to the conclusing that the evidence really is super overwhelming ...

Yes, literally from this article about this “research”

> A summary of their paper, which has not been published in a mainstream science journal, was submitted to EPA during the public comment period on a plan to roll back regulations for methane leaked during the production, processing, transmission and storage of oil and natural gas.

> "As far as from a global effect on climate, [methane] is immeasurably small," van Wijngaarden told E&E News. So "some of these people have said, you know, that could you please just write something up that we can use as ammunition," he said.

We have seen that scientists use to say that the Sun circled the Earth, therefore to dismiss any research that shows that stabbing yourself with a fork is painful is equally stupid.

In a world where everyone seems to think solutions to problems are always about manipulating the way people think and feel it's very hard to trust mainstream discourse.

> In a world where everyone seems to think solutions to problems are always about...

"everyone"? "always"? Your generalisations may be doing as much harm as anyone you're criticising.

> We have seen that doctors said & agreed that fats are bad and that cigarettes are good... So to dismiss any reasearch which shows that our effect on the climante is lesser than we thing is equally stupid.

Sure, science is an iterative process and it can make mistakes. But is that what happened here? Folks pointed out that the claim itself is odd since methane breaks down into CO2 which is yet another greenhouse gas, and the paper seems to ignore that. Furthermore, they pointed out he's not actually speaking to his specialty, so extra skepticism is reasonable.

> Climate activism has been politized: and once that happens all objectivity goes out of the window.

Aren't you guilty of doing exactly that in this post?

Governments (e.g. taxes on fuel) and oil companies have a financial incentive to promote fossil fuels so if they were funding research you would expect a bias against anthropogenic climate change. Can you resolve this contradiction?

The possible gain (both in money and in regulatory powers) from imposing the carbon footprint tax on corporations and individuals dwarfs any existing fuel taxes. It's not about climate, it's about further control of the populace's private affairs.