If climate scientists are in it for the money, they're doing it wrong - 0 views
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Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.
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That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.
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This is all, of course, ignoring what someone who can do the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform might make if they went to Wall Street.
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It's also worth pointing out what they get that money for, as exemplified by a fairly typical program announcement for NSF grants. Note that it calls for studies of past climate change and its impact on the weather. This sort of research could support the current consensus view, but it just as easily might not. And here's the thing: it's impossible to tell before the work's done. Even a study looking at the flow of carbon into and out of the atmosphere, which would seem to be destined to focus on anthropogenic climate influences, might identify a previously unknown or underestimated sink or feedback. So, even if the granting process were biased (and there's been no indication that it is), there is no way for it to prevent people from obtaining contrary data. The granting system is also set up to induce people to publish it, since a grant that doesn't produce scientific papers can make it impossible for a professor to obtain future funding.
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Maybe the money is in the perks that come with grants, which provide for travel and lab toys. Unfortunately, there's no indication that there's lots of money out there for the taking, either from the public or private sector. For the US government, spending on climate research across 13 different agencies (from the Department of State to NASA) is tracked by the US Climate Change Science Program. The group has tracked the research budget since 1989, but not everything was brought under its umbrella until 1991. That year, according to CCSP figures, about $1.45 billion was spent on climate research (all figures are in 2007 dollars). Funding peaked back in 1995 at $2.4 billion, then bottomed out in 2006 at only $1.7 billion.
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Funding has gone up a bit over the last couple of years, and some stimulus money went into related programs. But, in general, the trend has been a downward one for 15 years; it's not an area you'd want to go into if you were looking for a rich source of grant money. If you were, you would target medical research, for which the NIH had a $31 billion budget plus another $10 billion in stimulus money.
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Not all of this money went to researchers anyway; part of the budget goes to NASA, and includes some of that agency's (rather pricey) hardware. For example, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory cost roughly $200 million, but failed to go into orbit; its replacement is costing another $170 million.
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Might the private sector make up for the lack of government money? Pretty unlikely. For starters, it's tough to identify many companies that have a vested interest in the scientific consensus. Renewable energy companies would seem to be the biggest winners, but they're still relatively tiny. Neither the largest wind or photovoltaic manufacturers (Vestas and First Solar) appear in the Financial Times' list of the world's 500 largest companies. In contrast, there are 16 oil companies in the of the top 100, and they occupy the top two spots. Exxon's profits in 2010 were nearly enough to buy both Vestas and First Solar, given their market valuations in late February.
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climate researchers are scrambling for a piece of a smaller piece of the government-funded pie, and the resources of the private sector are far, far more likely to go to groups that oppose their conclusions.
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If you were paying careful attention to that last section, you would have noticed something funny: the industry that seems most likely to benefit from taking climate change seriously produces renewable energy products. However, those companies don't employ any climatologists. They probably have plenty of space for engineers, materials scientists, and maybe a quantum physicist or two, but there's not much that a photovoltaic company would do with a climatologist. Even by convincing the public of their findings—namely, climate change is real, and could have serious impacts—the scientists are not doing themselves any favors in terms of job security or alternative careers.
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But, surely, by convincing the public, or at least the politicians, that there's something serious here, they ensure their own funding? That's arguably not true either, and the stimulus package demonstrates that nicely. The US CCSP programs, in total, got a few hundred million dollars from the stimulus. In contrast, the Department of Energy got a few billion. Carbon capture and sequestration alone received $2.4 billion, more than the entire CCSP budget.
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The problem is that climatologists are well equipped to identify potential problems, but very poorly equipped to solve them; it would be a bit like expecting an astronomer to know how to destroy a threatening asteroid.
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The solutions to problems related to climate change are going to come in areas like renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and efficiency measures; that's where most of the current administration's efforts have focused. None of these are areas where someone studying the climate is likely to have a whole lot to add. So, when they advocate that the public take them seriously, they're essentially asking the public to send money to someone else.