more ugly fear porn from the ugliest alcoholic in Seattle.

Don't forget that the recipients of that funding contribute valuable work to the public good. This isn't just about jobs, or maintaining the status quo. From innovations in technology to new drugs to new surgical techniques to a better understanding of our world, we all benefit -- personally, economically, socially, intellectually, etc. -- from government investment in basic research.

@1 Ethan Linck's a drinker? Somebody tell DOD! And he ain't bad looking, really. I mean, you might have a point if you're no fan of side-burns . . . but you're being a little ungenerous, imho.

It is high time to rescue Science from the Leftist Universities and break up the circular jerkoff ring of Leftist eggheads-Leftist media-Leftist govt bureaucrats furiously sucking the public teat.

@5 yes, we get it, you're dumb as fuck and proud of it. Now go away.

"Scientists" who are dependent on Leftist University funding have fallen in line and rush to proclaim that there is CONSENSUS and the SCIENCE IS IRREFUTABLE blah blah blah.
They are terrified of losing their funding and see which way the political winds have been blowing.
They are spineless whores selling their opinion for grants and tenure.

Any "Scientist" who tells you the Science is settled is a crackpot.

Science is never 'settled'.

The Left is furiously trying to close the debate and get on with dictating to society how it will live to "cure" climate change.

BullShit.

Defunding places like UW is a huge first step to freeing Scientific inquiry and letting it get back to questioning all the assumptions and blowing up all the consensuses.

@8 You are a funny monkey.

Whoa, glad to see scientific coverage from someone with an actual background in the sciences! Unless I missed some recent work, welcome back!

Good Afternoon Charles,
I read your posting. Thanks for your disclosure. I hadn't known. Yeah, UW research funding may be cut. I'm not sure I like that. But, research does need to be unbiased. I recommend this piece by John Tierney of City Journal who used to write for the NYT:

https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-w…

@5, 8: I used to wonder "how fucking dumb is Comrade Commietaster?" Now I know.

@12: there's a reason Tierney doesn't write for the NYT any more.

research is not the problem. the problem is the action that needs to be taken to address the issues it documents. and conservatives simply don't want to address ACC in any comprehensive manner. they want to stick their own, and everyone else's, head in the sand. the short term profits of corporations outweigh the long-term survivability of the planet and they have since the consensus was reached. every bit of research oil & gas can poop out is used to delay action. grant freezes won't keep enough fish in the ocean to feed us all. you can't eat plastic.

"Sneer-and-Smear techniques predominate in the debate over climate change. President Obama promotes his green agenda by announcing that “the debate is settled,” and he denounces “climate deniers” by claiming that 97 percent of scientists believe that global warming is dangerous. His statements are false. While the greenhouse effect is undeniably real, and while most scientists agree that there has been a rise in global temperatures caused in some part by human emissions of carbon dioxide, no one knows how much more warming will occur this century or whether it will be dangerous. How could the science be settled when there have been dozens of computer models of how carbon dioxide affects the climate? And when most of the models overestimated how much warming should have occurred by now? These failed predictions, as well as recent research into the effects of water vapor on temperatures, have caused many scientists to lower their projections of future warming. Some “luke-warmists” suggest that future temperature increases will be relatively modest and prove to be a net benefit, at least in the short term.
The long-term risks are certainly worth studying, but no matter whose predictions you trust, climate science provides no justification for Obama’s green agenda—or anyone else’s agenda. Even if it were somehow proved that high-end estimates for future global warming are accurate, that wouldn’t imply that Greens have the right practical solution for reducing carbon emissions—or that we even need to reduce those emissions. Policies for dealing with global warming vary according to political beliefs, economic assumptions, social priorities, and moral principles. Would regulating carbon dioxide stifle economic growth and give too much power to the state? Is it moral to impose sacrifices on poor people to keep temperatures a little cooler for their descendants, who will presumably be many times richer? Are there more important problems to address first? These aren’t questions with scientifically correct answers.
Yet many climate researchers are passing off their political opinions as science, just as Obama does, and they’re even using that absurdly unscientific term “denier” as if they were priests guarding some eternal truth. Science advances by continually challenging and testing hypotheses, but the modern Left has become obsessed with silencing heretics. In a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch last year, 20 climate scientists urged her to use federal racketeering laws to prosecute corporations and think tanks that have “deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Similar assaults on free speech are endorsed in the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, which calls for prosecution of companies that make “misleading” statements about “the scientific reality of climate change.” A group of Democratic state attorneys general coordinated an assault on climate skeptics by subpoenaing records from fossil-fuel companies and free-market think tanks, supposedly as part of investigations to prosecute corporate fraud. Such prosecutions may go nowhere in court—they’re blatant violations of the First Amendment—but that’s not their purpose. By demanding a decade’s worth of e-mail and other records, the Democratic inquisitors and their scientist allies want to harass climate dissidents and intimidate their donors.
Just as in the debate over dietary fat, these dissidents get smeared in the press as corporate shills—but once again, the money flows almost entirely the other way. The most vocal critics of climate dogma are a half-dozen think tanks that together spend less than $15 million annually on environmental issues. The half-dozen major green groups spend more than $500 million, and the federal government spends $10 billion on climate research and technology to reduce emissions. Add it up, and it’s clear that scientists face tremendous pressure to support the “consensus” on reducing carbon emissions, as Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Tech, testified last year at a Senate hearing.
“This pressure comes not only from politicians but also from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves who are green activists,” Curry said. “This advocacy extends to the professional societies that publish journals and organize conferences. Policy advocacy, combined with understating the uncertainties, risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty and objectivity—without which scientists become regarded as merely another lobbyist group.”
That’s the ultimate casualty in the Left’s war: scientists’ reputations. Bad research can be exposed and discarded, but bad reputations endure. Social scientists are already regarded in Washington as an arm of the Democratic Party, so their research is dismissed as partisan even when it’s not, and some Republicans have tried (unsuccessfully) to cut off all social-science funding. The physical sciences still enjoy bipartisan support, but that’s being eroded by the green politicking, and climate scientists’ standing will plummet if the proclaimed consensus turns out to be wrong.
To preserve their integrity, scientists should avoid politics and embrace the skeptical rigor that their profession requires. They need to start welcoming conservatives and others who will spot their biases and violate their taboos. Making these changes won’t be easy, but the first step is simple: stop pretending that the threats to science are coming from the Right. Look in the other direction—or in the mirror."

@8: I'm curious. In this scientific-institution-free scenario you paint, where would the innovation come from? Who would be the ones performing inquiries for the general benefit of society? Would it be funded entirely by private corporations (who of course would never suppress results that might negatively impact their profits), or would everyone just stand around navel gazing, ignoring everything we've learned so far because they came from those institutions?

@12: Wrong author. Ethan, not Charles.

In the linked article, by only the third paragraph, he's referencing topics that the right would obliterate from the public's mind if they could, in the same topic he's posing the question of what areas of study have suffered. That's all the further I could make it.

@14

"... outweigh the long-term survivability of the planet"
Oh My.
Not the long-term survivability of the planet?!?

Relax.
The planet will survive.
We promise.
Can someone finds Max some dry panties?...

@16
It is not a "scientific-institution-free" scenario;
it is a "Far Left monopoly on funding and reporting on research" scenario.
Free scientists to question the Left's sacred cows without fear of career suicide.

Aw, if only I'd hit Refresh first before posting, I would have seen that citation-free screed attacking scientific consensus, completely oblivious to the existence of the peer review process (and by extension, the fact that breaking dogma - such as it is - in the scientific community typically comes with the respect of said peers, and a nice shiny Nobel prize).

sorry- let's try again...

@16
It is not a "scientific-institution-free" scenario;
it is a "Far-Left-monopoly-on-funding-and-reporting-on-research-free" scenario.
Free scientists to question the Left's sacred cows without fear of career suicide.

It would appear our poor fellow commenter CC has already succumbed to some otherwise easily-preventable malady, causing him to write long, incomprehensible skreeds wherein he confuses hard and soft scientific fields, and otherwise make a complete and utter laughingstock of himself.

I'm guessing Treponema Pallidum. Anyone else care to speculate?

#22 No one reads long alcohol induced posts. Sleep it off and get into a program.

I had the privilege of having a solidly middle-class upbringing thanks to my dad's job as a government scientist. His research (like much of what is happening in federal agencies) supported agriculture and other vital aspects of our country's basic functioning. My current job (environmental/food safety microbiology) is indirectly supported in some small amount by EPA grants. So, basically, I (and my family members) have an economic stake in this bullshit.

Yes, science is full of the biases and ideologies that pervade all aspects of human life; but science (and especially publicly-funded science) is our best bet for figuring out what's really going on. Climate change research is unnecessarily controversial but also is NOT the only thing the EPA (and USDA, NIH, etc.) do by a long stretch! I reject the characterization of grant recipients and government science workers as some sort of anti-business conspirators. They are, by and large, public servants who will never get rich off their work and whose work actively benefits all of us, which can't be said for any of the CEOs and industry-insiders Trump is appointing left and right to his cabinet. Trump obviously cares about manufacturing jobs... How about trying to care about science jobs, too?

With the combination of being both anti-science and xenophobic (many of our scientists and technologists are immigrants), the Trump Regime stands a good chance of permanently damaging the USA's status as the premier science and technology nation.

Of course, that's a minor thing in the comparison to the likely end of the USA as a open society with civil rights if Trump is not resisted to the maximum and removed from office ASAP. Which in turn is a minor thing in comparison to the long-term threat of climate change.

As a recently annointed Ph.D., I really can't find too much fault with the Trump administration priorities. The reality is that it was nearly impossible to fund your work anyway, and we were already headlong toward a privatized research funding paradigm. Maybe universities will have to take a look at their own endowments and budgets and start to actually support the faculty that sustain their reputations in the first place.

Sufficient support from the university itself will be a welcome change from of having us all spending 90% of our time desperately looking for government teats to suck at, instead of teaching students and actually doing the science we purport to do. Then we could focus more on teaching well and doing the work that they benefit from in the first place.