Found this image from a “Progressive” Cheer Leader:

Its all well and good, except that the “Global Warming” money is all coming from Government grants, not small private research groups, and PACs. These research grants are only interested in a “Global Crisis” so if the groups’ findings are NOT that the world is warming to dangerous levels the money goes away and their labs close down…so what do you think their numbers will do?
I witnessed the same cooking of numbers when I worked for NOAA on fisheries research. If they said fish stocks were stable then the money dries up, and the NOAA labs analyzing the data are reduced to a skeleton crew.
Government research is always walking the tight-rope, and I ended up being laid off because NOAA funds were shifted to the Iraq war. Also that’s a great little metric to look at. Look at how much the Department of Defense spent on Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you really think the oil company money is a drop in the bucket compared to what the .gov can throw at a convenient emotional fulcrum to pass laws of intervention and regulation?
**UPDATE** And I forgot about the whole “Consensus” thing. First one has to look at WHO is preaching “Greenhouse Effect”/ “Global Warming”/ “Manbearpig”. Yes we have a good number of climatologists, and ecologists, but look at the biggest advocate, Al Gore. He’s a lawyer turned politician, has he even taken a single course in ecology? I’ll also add myself into this. I’m a marine biologist who now spends his time doing medical research, I’m personally not the guy who’s going to blow the doors off this. Still I became a skeptic of this back in the late 90s when I was taking ecology courses and my PROFESSORS were calling what was then the “Greenhouse Effect” a dubious theory. More here:
Neil Stenhouse, lead author of a paper accepted for publication by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, trashed the ability of American Meteorological Society meteorologists to understand global warming after they failed to validate Stenhouse’s mythical global warming…Stenhouse, a psychologist and doctoral student in communications at George Mason University, emailed all full members of the American Meteorological Society for whom he could find an email address and asked them to fill out an online survey on global warming. More than 1,800 AMS meteorologists filled out the survey.
Only 52 percent said global warming is occurring and is caused mostly by humans – which is itself a far cry from having 52 percent say humans are causing a global warming crisis. The results were a huge blow to the mythical notion that all or nearly all scientists agree that humans are causing a global warming crisis. This is especially the case considering the AMS survey reflected the views of scientists with atmospheric science expertise. This wasn’t a survey of engineers or other non-atmospheric scientists with little if any atmospheric science expertise….Considering only 52 percent of AMS scientists believe humans are the main cause for some global warming, and considering the Guardian protested that only 13 percent of AMS meteorologists listed climate science as their primary area of expertise (as if having expertise in one area of atmospheric science precludes expertise in others), this leaves Stenhouse asserting that the term “not climate experts” applies to a majority of AMS members.
Yep, meteorologists study WEATHER, and you’ll note that many from the religion (and it is a religion now) of “Global Warming” will tell you, that climate change is NOT weather…tho recently they have taken to blame extremely cold conditions on what was once called “Greenhouse Effect”. The bulk of the people who preach this stuff, including the blogger who posted the image, and the activist that created the image have NO scientific background, so they consider anybody with a science degree an “expert”.
Of course I’m not an “Expert” because I’m obviously one of those scientists being bribed by the oil companies…which further makes me an idiot, because I really don’t want to go to the lab today!
There really is no “Consensus”, there are just a large group of activists and scientists who are either emotionally, spiritually, or financially invested in this being the crisis that the .gov wants.