Follow the money: Science

The moneyed interests are often used to impugn those who do not believe properly. Tom Bethell notes that money is indeed an issue but not necessarily as often accused. Indeed, it is the accusers rather than the accused who have questions to answer when it comes to financial matters (ht Orrin Judd). It is A Disgrace to Science.

It is also where other major fields of science stand today—at the mercy of a contrived consensus.
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Government funding has been the major subversive force. If you read Science, as I do, you see that the issue the magazine cares about above all others, and editorializes about week after week, is funding. Government funding. The constant concern about money means that Science and other journals feel obliged to keep up a drumbeat of articles that sustain the mood of crisis surrounding a given issue. Climate change is the leading illustration today, but there are others.
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COULD SOMEONE EXPLAIN WHY oil company money corrupts and government money does not? The government has now spent about $25 billion of our money in promoting climate scares. Oil companies have been reduced, pathetically, to telling us how “green” they are.

Since WW II, science has become a major governmental enterprise. That war marks the shift of funding for research from private to public sources. The reason for that shift was, to some extent, that research inquiries became large scale and needed capital and other resources that were not readily available in the private sector. The change in funding also changed the focus from research that would support innovation and invention towards research for altruistic or ideological ends.

Climate and weather research has been marked by the quest for ever larger (and more expensive) computers. Its original impetus for improving commerce efficiency and safety has changed to that of saving mankind from himself. Saving mankind is a thesis that can generate public money and that tends to distort the traditional goals of scientific activity.