The warmist gravy train

Richard North' latest post gives details of the astronomical amount of money devoted by state and para-statal organizations to keeping the global warming scam going, which, he concludes:

. . . in equivalent spending is about five times the amount spent on the wartime Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb – then the biggest ever amount spent on one project. It rather puts the spending in perspective, especially as we seem to have very little to show for it, other than a very large number of academics bought and paid-for by the climate change lobby.

Actually, whatever uses the eek!-o-freak phenomenon has been put to subsequently, my research in the early 1990s found that environmentalism's proven ability to generate university funding was always the driver. After massively over-expanding following World War II, the US university system was facing a moment of truth as the vast edifice of aging, tenured mediocrities threatened to collapse of it own weight.

In the face of a decline in the rate of increase in university funding, eek!-o-freakery's ability to generate whole new departments was manna. Added to which, it also permitted academics to recover some of the prestige that had leaked from the sprung seams of their bloated profession.

The tipping point was when the ferociously polluting Soviet Union collapsed, freeing western left-wingers from the awkward living proof of their cognitive dissonance. Global warming became the new Mecca, and the gravy train now has so many on it, there is so much money involved, so many reputations at stake and so many interests served by it, that I strongly doubt whether merely factual refutation can bring a halt to whole disgusting process.