No problem, I find this conversation enjoyable and useful.

I went looking for info on the funding of CRU. The best I could find was this:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/copenhagen-climate-ch...

The Climategate docs had a spreadsheet with funding sources. So that's quite old now, but back then it was about £13 million from various sources, all of which were the government. I suppose they probably do get a bit of funding from non-government sources, but it seems it isn't likely to be much.

It shows Professor Jones, along with other academics at the university, received more than 50 separate grants with a value of £13.7 million from a number of funding bodies including the European Union, Nato, and the US department of energy. Several British bodies also gave substantial sums including the Met Office, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority and the Department for the Environment.

Perhaps this article doesn't list any private sector grantees, but there are plenty of government bodies to go around.

Re: everyone getting the same results, is academia corrupt.

The research around the world doesn't agree entirely, but it's pretty close. However, it's all based on the same datasets. There are only a few temperature datasets available, really only two major datasets and one is maintained by the CRU. It's really an incredibly influential organisation, which is presumably why someone hacked it and why it was such a splash.

Now, if the temperature record is unreliable all climate research based on that record is also unreliable. You can't argue the world is getting warmer unless you can reliably measure temperatures, that's pretty basic.

Unfortunately we know for sure the temperature record must be unreliable, because the historical temperature dataset scientists use (which goes back to about 1850) keeps being revised. If you use the dataset that was current in the 1990s, then compare the dataset to the ones being provided today, you can see that the historical temperatures have been changed.

This isn't done entirely secretly; the idea is that thermometer readings have to be adjusted to take into effect various confounding factors and that's perfectly legitimate. But there are practical problems:

1. People have been measuring temperatures with thermometers for over a century, yet scientists are still changing how they adjust the raw data today, with the result that the official temperatures seen back in the 30s and 40s, or even earlier, are still changing. The results of the adjustments are massive and fundamentally change the conclusions of the science. But by logical implication, if modern scientists are actually correct to do these adjustments then all previous analyses of the climate made until now must have been wrong. Why is nobody alerting the world to the prior wrongness of climate datasets?

2. Temperature dataset creators like the CRU have a nasty habit of claiming they destroyed or "lost" the raw, unadjusted data. They have also fought very strongly to block the release of raw datasets, and engaged in other sorts of behaviour that scientists aren't meant to engage in. That is, the only datasets available are those that have been "retouched" by people who get multi-million pound budgets because of predictions of warming.

This large conflict of interest requires enormous trust in the climate scientists. It is thus unfortunate that revisions of historical data always create warming effects where previously none existed. The apparent pause in rising temperatures was discussed by scientists for many years - the latest temperature datasets from CRU rewrite history and erase it entirely.

So you have to understand that climate skeptics are entirely understandable. Their positions aren't weird or crazy. Climate scientists are asking the world for staggeringly huge amounts of trust: to trust them about their understanding of climate trends although they're simultaneously claiming that all recorded temperature data, even as recently as 10 years ago, was wrong.

This graphic illustrates the kind of thing that happens:

https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Re...

Last thing:

the British government has been decidedly anti AGW and renewables in the last decade, with policies distinctly in favour of fossil

Hmm, did you notice Theresa May's last act before she resigned? She committed the UK to massive climate change spending:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/11/may-defe...

That's not the act of a government that's anti-AGW.