Causes and Consequences of the Climate Science Boom

Scientific disciplines, like economies, can and do experience booms and busts. We document a boom in climate science which is sustained by massive levels of funding by government entities and whose scientific direction is set by an extra-scientific organization, the IPCC. Although the popular perception is that the IPCC’s function is the dispassionate collection and summarization of research in climate science, it has emerged as a “big player” in the scientific arena, championing of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming and emphasizing some of the more extreme implications of that hypothesis. We note the difficulties in obtaining definitive empirical clarity due to the complex nature of climate, the feedback between the effects of the IPCC’s advocacy and the government’s willingness to fund the science, the ideological and political agendas at play, the dangers to the integrity of scientific procedure in the context of ideological bias, and the poor performance of the “crony capitalist” enterprises that have grown on the back of politicized science.