“These assertions were used to acquire grant money, specifically, the Carnegie Corporation which aids research into “the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region”.

“The IPCC have now retracted their claim and revised their stance, stating that if the threat would to exist, it would take centuries.”

Isn’t that interesting. Scientists with ulterior motives? The hell you say!!

BTW, Erin and I will very likely be in San Diego again this summer, hopefully we can meet up with you guys again…

Getting funding isn’t a simple thing. For federal funding your research proposal, which explains why your research should be performed and supports your position with other accepted research, is heavily scrutinized. There are specific research topics or areas to which the government agency allocates money for research. So, all research proposals dealing with a topic compete against one another for funding. The selection for funding is by a peer review process, other expert scientists in the field who are not applying for funding that round review the proposals. There are usually 20 scientists per committee and each proposal is reviewed thoroughly by a sub-committee who present the merits of the proposal to the whole committee and they debate which proposals merit funding.

The number of grants funded is typically only about 20% (or lower), so only the best proposals are funded. So wild unsubstantiated speculation will not be funded, the proposal needs to present evidence that supports the hypothesis that is being proposed if there is even a chance for there to be funding.

So in the case of climate change research, decades of work and data have gone into developing an understanding of what has been happening. The general public has only seen the final stages of a decades long evolution of the theory. The experts have gone from being skeptics to seeing and discovering the facts that now form the understanding of what they believe.

Sorry for the long comment, as Cory stated, the general public often doesn’t know what goes on in the scientific process, so hopefully this sheds some light on how the money is involved in research.

So if one scientist or group of scientists can be lured by money or fame into making a claim that can be proven false, there will normally be other experts in that field who would see that as an opportunity to boost their own reputation by publicly pointing out the error.

And even if those other scientists didn’t point out the error, they’d still be very unlikely to risk their own reputations by publicly agreeing with any idea that they know will eventually be proven false.

That’s why it’s such a big deal when scientists do all agree on something–they do so mainly because, in the face of evidence, they have no other choice but to agree.