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When Scientists Give Up
New submitter ferespo sends a report from All Things Considered about the struggle for scientific funding in today's political and economic environment. "Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them." It's a tough situation for new scientists trying to set up labs. In addition to all of the scientific work they do, it's essentially a full-time job in addition to that to maintain funding. The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table. The consequences of this are two-fold: not only are we giving up on the types of research that led to so many of today's marvels, but many promising young scientists are giving up on the field altogether.
So.. let's mod the idiot +4 insightful, because we're apparently dumbfucks who believe stupid-conspiracy theories about science funding.
So here's the Actual breakdown of NSF research funding(which is about 80% of their total funding, with the rest allocated to science education and overhead).
Now, back to that first link. About 1.75% of research funding goes to environmental research of any sort, which is the umbrella category for climate change research among a fuck-ton of others. half goes to defense research.
So if you want an "easy target" for money, there's your answer. Not paranoia about evil climate change researchers. Next is health, with a good 25%ish, which is the thing that this article whines about. So, yeah, change from an area that gets 25% of national research spending, to one that gets 2. Good job.
Seriously?
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
The Koch' brothers also funded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatur project, which started out with key people being sceptical about global warming. But the data convinced them otherwise:
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
In fact, the conspiracy theory that the government is funding climate scientists who say that global warming is real and caused by human activity with the purpose to strengthen the government's authoritarian grip on society is a myth. But also the more plausible idea that scientists exaggerate their findings to get more funding does not seem to be true:
http://arstechnica.com/science...