"Hmmm. I wonder how much oil and coal money is covering these expenses?"

Gee? Who knows? Maybe they're coming up with the entire THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS?

I mean, that's a lot of money -- being a whole THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS, and all.

It will be telling when we find out who doesn't turn down those inducements.

OK, I'll bite Steve.

What will it tell??

I suspect this is obvious to most. For you it might not be obvious, but I think I'll wait to answer you until you answer the questions I've posed to you (see thread on Oreskes).

"the politically corrrect AGW gospel"

Yeah, it's always surpising how some tiny little secret cabal of nefarious environazis managed to make AGW the "politically correct" orthodoxy _all_ _over_ _the_ _world_, isn't it?

"The problem with climate skeptics is that they are considered mavericks who have problems getting funding from universities"

No, the problem is that denialists keep trying to paint themselves as "mavericks".

"(after all they are advocates of pseudo-science ....)."

Now _this_ is the real problem. Confusing degrees with radians; confusing model variances with observation variances... Milloy and friends like to call this "Sound Science", but I call it by its real name: crap science.

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Frank Bi, http://zompower.tk/

Your use of the word deniers rings a familiar bell:

I copied this from:

http://solarscience.auditblogs.com/2007/11/20/place-your-bets-for-sc24/#comments

The Modern Science Method:

1. Form clique of friends
2. Announce new “ground-breaking paper” to the press. Announce “result” in soundbite form.
3. Get papers published peer reviewed by friends
4. Go to United Nations and declare “the science is settled”
5. Denigrate other scientists who disagree with you as “Deniers” and in league with [insert scary corporation here]
6. Praise other “independent” scientific papers written by your friends which miraculously support your hypothesis.
7. Repeat the above two processes so that you and your friends get lions share of grant money while your opponents are starved of funding and attention.
8. Hide data/methodology so as to prevent replication. Make sure only copy of data is on a floppy disk and never, ever backed up like normal people.
9. Start weblog.
10. When cornered, declare that “science has moved on”

Quite funny (or sad), don't you think so?

"Starved of funding" indeed, that is the reason why Heartland is so kind to offer some financial incentives which dwarfs government fundings for scientists who attend conferences.

There is no shortage of money for PR by folks like this. Look up some names of 'scientists' attending the conference. Now search how many op-eds they've published in the MSM, how many laypublic speaking engagements they've given, and how many think tanks they belong to. They seem to be able to get plenty of money for this kind of thing. The Heartland Institute is not filling any void there. There are millions of dollars going toward this kind of crap, er, non-science. Look up the names of the people publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Compare the dearth of op-eds, laypublic presentations, etc. A simple comparison in Canada is Andrew Weaver (U Vic) vs Tim Ball (formerly U Winnipeg). Ball claims he doesn't even know who's paying for all of his speaking engagements (please try to argue that he's underfunded wrt science). You almost never hear of Weaver.

There are millions to be had from Exxon, Heartland, API, Koch Foundation, etc, etc, etc. How much of it goes toward science? If the research you claim is so badly underfunded, why doesn't this money fill some of that void? Answer: It doesn't because such science lacks merit. It would be like paying someone to do independent studies on health harms of cigarettes or Minamata disease -- the corporations that used to do it hid the results of the research and then shut down the research programs. There are more examples of this. Some might cite weapons inspectors as another. The money that could go toward independent science instead goes to garbage PR. That is an investment decision made by slimy groups like Heartland.

Good post, Steve.
The red herring about anti-AGW scientists being unable to get research funding is extremely irritating. As if any of them actually do any research (at least, in the last two decades!).

Fern Mackenzie

Yes, Steve L wins! :)

And I'm amused that Chris responded to my point about methodological problems with the denialists' "science" by cutting-and-pasting a totally irrelevant blog post which is devoid of facts.

This is the kind of "science" and "logic" we should be giving "equal time" to, I suppose.

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Frank Bi, http://zompower.tk/

I don't know. Is the UNFCCC a private think-tank funded by private corporations?

More cutting-edge denialist "logic", I see.

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Frank Bi, http://zompower.tk/