Sure, the funding source is what matters. So why do people assume that academics have neutral or independent funding sources?

The basic argument that climate scientists wouldn't get funding to do their jobs if it weren't for their predictions of global catastrophe, is a sound one. If climate scientists were reporting "our models suggest the climate is sorta like it used to be, there's probably not much going on", it'd be a backwater with almost no funding and absolutely no media interest. If economists took a stance of, "the economy is too complex to model or predict, but we'll collect a lot of data for you" then how many economists would be employed, or have newspaper columns?

There's a structural incentive to be very confident in your ability to predict the future, if you're in certain areas of academia, as there are effectively no other employers. It's not just a climate issue.

I'd feel a lot happier and more confident in the narrative if I felt sure this structural problem was at least recognised, ideally dealt with. But I don't see it:

- The media present academics as neutral 'experts' whose word is beyond question.

- Academics themselves encourage this and never talk about their own conflicts of interest.

- Famous journals are run by academics with the same set of incentives.

This is how you get stuff like https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... happening, where 450 different studies over multiple decades investigated an effect that in the end didn't exist.

We're told "science" self corrects and will always yield the right answer in the end. That may well be true if you use a wide definition of science that includes analysis done by random bloggers and anyone else who wants to contribute. But it's not at all clear that's true for the government funded academic apparatus, on at the scales needed, or on any reasonable timescale. It's entirely possible to believe in the scientific method whilst still retaining skepticism about the output of particular groups of people who do scientific work within particular social structures.

Note: The CRU shenanigans were revealed through email hacking, not any kind of formal scientific process. In fact the researchers were deliberately evading laws put in place to try and stop that kind of thing. And even though we know ordinary science can self-correct because major faults like 5-HTTLPR are caught, it took decades. Psychology is riven with entire sub-fields that were studied since the 60s and are now known to be totally wrong. How many similar bodies of knowledge are waiting to collapse? There are plenty of examples of things thought to be "science" that evaporated when examined closely, often with scientists involved simply denying that anything had collapsed at all!

It looks especially bad when climate scientists start adjusting old datasets to make their predictions come true, as has been happening recently with the new versions of the global temperature datasets. For many years the temperature data showed that global warming had stopped: average temperates were stable. This violated all prior models predicting what would happen and was a major problem for climate science as an endeavour. Now there are new 'versions' of old temperature readings that mysteriously disappear the plateau from the public record.

There might be solid, scientific reasons for this. It might be that for many decades global temperature readings were fundamentally wrong and nobody detected it. But if something like that happens, climate scientists need to be very publicly screaming about what went wrong, and why, and what lessons they learned from it, because otherwise it looks suspicious as hell. It looks very much like they're adjusting the data to fit the models in order to preserve their own jobs.

It doesn't matter that the Climate Research Unit is NOT government funded. Sponsors have included BP, the Nuffield Foundation and Shell.

In the 1970s yes, before it was researching global warming. Currently it's a part of a university and gets its funding from governments (including the US Dept of Energy).