Science

If climate scientists are in it for the money, they’re doing it wrong

Ars takes a look at the accusations that climate scientists push the consensus.

John Timmer – May 31, 2016 1:10 AM | 489

It's Memorial Day, all Ars staff is off, and we're grateful for it (running a site remains tough work). But on a normal Monday, inevitably we'd continue to monitor news from the world of climate change. Our John Timmer examined the claims that scientists are in it solely for the money in February 2011, and we're resurfacing his piece for your holiday reading pleasure.

One of the more unfortunate memes that makes an appearance whenever climate science is discussed is the accusation that, by hyping their results, climate scientists are ensuring themselves steady paychecks, and may even be enriching themselves. A Google search for "global warming gravy train" pulls out over 50,000 results (six of them from our forums).

It's tempting to respond with indignation; after all, researchers generally are doing something they love without a focus on compensation. But, more significantly, the accusation simply makes no sense on any level.

You can't make a bundle pushing the consensus

So, are there big bucks to be had in climate science? Since it doesn't have a lot of commercial appeal, most of the people working in the area, and the vast majority of those publishing the scientific literature, work in academic departments or at government agencies. Penn State, home of noted climatologists Richard Alley and Michael Mann, has a strong geosciences department and, conveniently, makes the department's salary information available. It's easy to check, and find that the average tenured professor earned about $120,000 last year, and a new hire a bit less than $70,000.

That's a pretty healthy salary by many standards, but it's hardly a racket. Penn State appears to be on the low end of similar institutions, and is outdone by two other institutions in its own state (based on this report). But, more significantly for the question at hand, we can see that Earth Sciences faculty aren't paid especially well. Sure, they do much better than the Arts faculty, but they're somewhere in the middle of the pack, and get stomped on by professors in the Business and IT departments.

If they really wanted to make money at Penn State, they'd be coaching football or basketball. If they wanted to make money doing the sort of data analysis or modeling of complex systems that climatologists perform all the time, of course, they should go to Wall Street.

It's also worth pointing out what they get that money for, as exemplified by a fairly typical program announcement for NSF grants. It calls for studies of past climate change and its impact on the weather—pretty typical stuff.

This sort of research could support the current consensus view. But it just as easily might not. It's impossible to tell before the work's done. And that's true for pretty much every scientific funding opportunity—you can't dictate the results in advance.

So, even if the granting process were biased (and there's been no indication that it is), there is no way for it to prevent people from obtaining data that poses problems for the current consensus. The granting system is also set up to induce people to publish it, since receiving a grant that doesn't produce scientific papers can make it much less likely for a professor to obtain future funding.

There's not much money in climate (or green energy)

Maybe the money is in the perks that come with grants, which provide for travel and lab toys. Unfortunately, there's no indication that there's lots of money out there for the taking, either from the public or private sector.

For the US government, spending on climate research across 13 different agencies (from the Department of State to NASA) is tracked by the US Climate Change Science Program. The group has tracked the research budget since 1989, but not everything was brought under its umbrella until 1991. That year, according to CCSP figures, about $1.45 billion was spent on climate research (all figures are in 2007 dollars). Funding peaked back in 1995 at $2.4 billion, then bottomed out in 2006 at only $1.7 billion.

Funding has gone up a bit over the last couple of years, but it's at best brought us back to somewhere around the 1995 pea (not adjusting for inflation). It's clearly not a growth field, and it's not even one that's especially well funded to start with—the NIH alone has a $31 billion budget.

Not all of this money went to researchers anyway; part of the budget goes to NASA, and includes some of that agency's (rather pricey) hardware. For example, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory cost roughly $200 million, but failed to go into orbit; its replacement cost another $170 million.

Might the private sector make up for the lack of government money? Pretty unlikely. For starters, it's tough to identify many companies that have a vested interest in the scientific consensus. Renewable energy companies would seem to be the biggest winners, but they're still relatively tiny. In contrast, half of Fortune's top 10 global companies are in fossil fuels.

So, despite sporadic accusations otherwise, climate researchers are scrambling for a piece of a smaller piece of the government-funded pie, and the resources of the private sector are far, far more likely to go to groups that oppose their conclusions.

They lose by winning

If you were paying careful attention to that last section, you would have noticed something funny: the industry that seems most likely to benefit from taking climate change seriously produces renewable energy products. However, those companies don't employ any climatologists. They probably have plenty of space for engineers, materials scientists, and maybe a quantum physicist or two, but there's not much that a photovoltaic company would do with a climatologist.

And that's generally true. Most of the places we'd look to for helping solve climate change would have no reason to employ a climatologist. Even by convincing the public of their findings—namely, climate change is real, and could have serious impacts—the scientists are not doing themselves any favors in terms of job security or alternative careers.

But, surely, by convincing the public, or at least the politicians, that there's something serious here, they ensure their own funding? That's arguably not true either. You can contrast the flat funding in climate science with the money going to clean energy. In 2012, funding for research there was already more than twice that of climate science. Just two years later, in 2014, it was above three times.

This really shouldn't be a surprise. Climatologists are well equipped to identify potential problems, but very poorly equipped to solve them; it would be a bit like expecting an astronomer to know how to destroy a threatening asteroid.

The solutions to problems related to climate change are going to come in areas like renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and efficiency measures; that's where most of the current administration's efforts have focused. None of these are areas where someone studying the climate is likely to have a whole lot to add. So, when they advocate that the public take them seriously, they're essentially asking the public to send money to someone else.

To sum up: climate research doesn't pay well, the amount of money dedicated to it has been largely flat, and if the researchers were successful in convincing the public that climate change was a serious threat, the response would be to give money to someone else. If you come across someone arguing that scientists are in it for the money, then you can probably assume they are willing to make arguments without getting their facts straight.

John Timmer Senior Science Editor

John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

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