Mann did disclose the source of his funding. That's the issue here, Soon didn't. Anything you need to know about his research is in his published work and that's what he should be judged on. Anything else is irrelevant.

Capitalism's problem as it is currently practiced is it's too easy to externalize costs and foist them off on someone else or society in general. It's a distortion of capitalism when the full cost of something is not included in its price.

I have to wonder what Freeman Dyson would say if he sat down for a day with someone like James Hansen who could speak with him on his level about the issues. I suspect he might change his tune.

The whole issue with Soon was not that he was funded by a fossil fuel company but that he failed to disclose that he was funded by a fossil fuel company. In most cases a study funded by a government grant is required to disclose the source of the funding in published papers and it's good scientific ethics to disclose any potential conflicts of interest.

Studies funded by the National Science Foundation, a major source of the funding you're talking about, explicitly require that you note the grant number in your published papers. From that you should have no problem auditing where the money went.

More money may be spent in climate research but how much of that goes into designing, building, launching and downloading data from satellites? How much of it goes into supercomputers and other hardware? How much goes in to funding expeditions to remote sites? Very little gets spent on that sort of thing by the other side.

The issue isn't who Soon was funded by but the fact that he failed to disclose who he was funded by.

You don't understand what a scientific consensus is. In science a consensus exists when there are no longer arguments among the practitioners of a science about a particular point in that science. It's not something they vote on, it just happens organically.

Where are the "Funny" mods? I laughed so hard at that I had to explain to my coworkers what I was laughing at.

That's a pretty twisted interpretation of what happened.

One thing's for sure. If we don't do something about AGW all of those things will come to pass as the effects become more and more evident and people start demanding action.

On the other hand we could just impose a gradually increasing carbon tax* that would require a relatively small bureaucracy to administer and have the effect of making non-carbon energy sources more attractive as time goes on.

*The carbon tax should be imposed at the well/mine head or point of import of fossil fuels and possibly a tariff on imports from high carbon emitting countries. The carbon tax's proceeds should be distributed as an equal dividend to all legal US residents. The would have the effect of easing the tax's burden on low income residents and penalizing high carbon producers. The existing IRS could handle the dividend part of it.

I think you replied to the wrong person. That line was quoted from the post I replied to.

Do the big generators supplying electricity to the utility pay transport costs? I don't think so. They just get paid wholesale price for the electricity they supply to the grid. At most someone with solar producing excess power should be charged for a two-way meter and the incoming electricity transport cost. They should be paid wholesale prices for the excess power they produce.

Within a decade or so the cost of in home batteries will likely come down enough that it will be practical to produce and store your own electricity and tell the utilities to get screwed, especially in the southern US.

I wonder if one factor in increasing allergies is that in the past before modern medicine many people with a serious allergy would die young and their allergy would never have been identified as such.

I doubt there is much if any US Government money going in to building the Keystone XL pipeline. It's a private venture. Of course a lot of government money has been spent on analyzing it.