[...]always a big fan of linking to bloggers that I love but don’t like spam links? Check this wordpress plugin.[...]……

I would first answer your points by calling attention to the morality of forcing people to fund things. When government is used, it means it is automatically forcing people willing and unwilling to pay for it. Forcing people to pay for something against their will, when they have not violated the equal rights of another, is immoral. The goodness or necessariness of the reason for the government funding, in this case science or the arts, does not justify forcing someone. Just because something is good or worthwhile, it does not justify forcibly taking someone else’s money to pay for it.

What is the alternative? Free will giving. I believe that there are more than enough people who have interests in science and the arts to amass their monies together and fund research. It would certainly force the researchers to be frugal and to concentrate on the more important aspects because they would know that funding is not guaranteed forever from the government.

Rewards for work do not always come in the form of money. The idea that one has contributed to important discovery is also a reward that could motivate some people to finance or do research. Why do many teachers teach when they know full well that a lot of teaching positions, at least in the beginning years, will not pay a lot? They uninimously say it is first and formost because they love teaching. They get part of their reward from what they do because they see themeselves as doing something meaningful. People are not becoming teachers because of the prospect of amassing large quantities of wealth.

I don’t understand how quoting from the Heartland Institute’s script can be considered unbiased information, let alone information submitted without a vested interest. I believe the point of this article was to try and adopt a culture of free thinking science that is not tied to special interests funding. I’m all for the debate, but as commented by Pete above “true science is humble and does not make absolute statements”, and to your point a broader timeline should be evaluated other than the last 5-50 years.

It is cooler today than in 1998.

The oceans are cooler today than in 1998.

Global warming has not been evident since 1941.There was a cooling from 1941-1976.The Southern Hemisphere never warmed up since 1976.

Sea Level stopped rising 3 years ago.

The level of atmospheric humidy is dropping.

The frequencies of La-nina is increasing and those of El-nino decreasing.

The weight of the atmosphere creates most of the so called “greenhouse effect”.

There are always more to list.

Similarly, climate alarmists point to the disappearnce of snow at the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro as evidence of global warming, when in fact it is a decrease in precipitation (due at least in part by local deforestation) which is causing less snowfall on top of a mountain where temperatures remain below freezing year round.

As far as funding scientific research, those early people were a product of their times. Meaning, they were an anomaly, or at least not the norm and were celebrated for their achievements. Bell, Lilly and Edison were products of their time and came up with products that filled a need and should be applauded for pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, as it were. This kind of innovation on a company level still happens, although it’s probably not as lofty a profession as it once was. It happens for the same reasons it happened back then, innovation (and money, of course.

The problem with climate study and similar work is that it is done to better understand a situation, or as a broader view science for science sake, which on the surface is a great thing. The only problem is that it doesn’t result in devices like the telephone. Since there is no direct money to be gained from such experiments, who is going to spend their own money without a suitable return on investment? In this regard, it is a good thing that our government is willing to fund science (and the arts) for that matter to make us a better society. It is a sad thing when public interests interfere in this process.

It occurs naturally in the ecosystem. Al Gore exhales vast volumes of it every time he repeats his error-filled presentation. Vegetation actually requires it to help fuel the photosynthesis process, which supplies oxygen so that Al Gore can continue to spread his error-filled alarmist agenda.

You ask: [\"Can we truly remove the agenda from science without the loss of funding? IF not the government and other large money contributors to science, who will provide the money?”]

As a counter question for you to consider: Who funded science in America before there was an income tax, and before federal government elbowed it\’s way into the science equation? Because they weren\’t a player in Science a century ago, and Science did seem to do just fine.

Eli Lilly did some pretty amazing work without a penny from the government, and millions of people owe much longer lives to his work and his discoveries.
Who funded Bell?
Who funded Edison?
It sure wasn\’t the federal government! And their investigations and inventions were NOT confined to what the politicians and bureaucrats in DC were interested in and willing to pay for.

Had they been so constrained, there\’s little doubt that you and I would not be exchanging points of view typed into what are basic PC\’s, that sport far more computing power than the entire world could muster 50 years ago.

The key issue with the science, as I see it, is that the science being portrayed by the AGW crowd is bottom-up rather than top-down. That is, they start with a series of equations describing the physical processes thought to be responsible for global climate and then simultaneously solve these equations to produce a result. If the result resembles (plus or minus)the historical records (including climate proxy data derived from tree rings, ice cores, etc.), this lends a certain amount of credibility to the model’s output. However, this only proves that the model appears to predict the past. Extending the results of this model into the future is extremely risky and suspect. Sort of like back-testing a stock market model only to see its failure in the current markets. Credible scientists claim that a number of the physical climate phenomena are still not well understood and that this mix-and-match approach is extremely problematical. Just reading the notes regarding the necessity to “smooth” and manipulate input data along with other notes on the assumptions made during the model’s run is not very encouraging if one is looking for the type of exactitude one requires before disrupting a nation’s economy and repressing the freedom of its citizens.

We certainly should welcome new research, but coupling science to public policy which cripples our economy and weakens our nation for the self-interest and benefit of politicians and their paying special interests is insane.