If I wanted to do research on,
shall we say,
the squirrels of Sussex,
what I would do,
and this is anytime
from 1990 onwards,
I would write my grant
application saying:
"I want to investigate...
the not-gathering
behaviour of squirrels,
with special reference
to the effects of
global warming",
and that way I get my money...
if I forget to mention
global warming...
I might not get the money.
There's a question in my mind...
that the large amounts of money
that have been fed into this particular,
rather small area of science
have distorted the
overall scientific effort.
We're all competing for funds
and if your field is the
focus of concern,
then you have done much
less work rationalizing
why your field should be funded.
By the 1990's tenths of billions of dollars of government
funding in the US,
UK and elsewhere
were being diverted into
research relating
to global warming.
A large portion of those funds
went into building computer models
to forecast what the climate
will be in the future.
But how accurate are those models?
Doctor Roy Spencer
is a senior scientist
for climate studies
at NASA's Marshall
space flights Center;
he has been awarded medals
for exceptional scientific achievement
in both NASA
and the American
Meteorological Society.
Climate models are only as good