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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

Exposed: a US-based 77 billion dollar climate alarmist network:

  https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43227.pdf

(NB: My research has about as much bearing on the legitimate disagreement over the causes and extent of global warming as the original article.)

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Well, one pot of money goes towards grants and publications subject to peer review, and scientific datasets that are publicly accessible, while the other comes from shady origins with no review whatsoever, for purposes that are clearly marked as PR, lobby and obstructionism...

With the series of exposes about the shortcomings of the peer review process it seems odd to lean on that very much. This seems particularly true since this topic is so politically charged and there would be virtually no funding available for climate change research absent government spending.

You don't throw the baby out with the bath water. That certain journals aren't doing peer review correctly, or that there is politics in the academia isn't a reason to not have peer review at all. And it does seem to work for some (PLoS One, for example). A flawed peer review system to validate knowledge is still better than a propaganda system driven for short term corporate gain.

Also - most academic scientific research depends on government spending. That's the whole point of academia, no? To work on problems companies don't want to fund because of no clear short-term impact on the bottom line. Not everyone is a Bell Labs or Google.

I do have to admit I sort of find it amusing when climate denialist alarmists (mmm, watch me pile the -ists on!) try to scream "Follow the money!" as if billions upon billions of dollars don't depend on climate alarmism being maintained exactly as is.

If "money" disproves or proves scientific hypotheses, there's a lot of things that need to be rewritten.

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