How is Pot Like Global Warming?

Research for both is funded by the government, and specific results are expected

Read the whole thing.

...Gupta initially opposed marijuana legalization because a review of the medical literature showed him that 96% of all published articles found some sort of negative effect of marijuana, and almost no articles showed a benefit, especially compared to existing approved medications. However, a couple of anecdotal cases coming out of the states that had legalized medicinal marijuana in SPITE of the federal governments laws caused him to go back and reexamine the funding model. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been surprising, but he learned that 96% of all funded research was to look for negative effects of marijuana, and that to get funded and permission to get government grown pot was so difficult that there simply weren’t all that many papers in the first place. In well over thirty years of intensive examination, all of the examination was literally preselected to find problems, almost none to find benefits, and one had to walk on water and push much paper to do either one (and relatively few scientists had bothered).
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This situation almost perfectly matches the evolution of “climate science”.  Nobody cared about it for decades, but suddenly a group of individuals emerged that all benefited from the demonization of carbon. This included environmental groups, that hated civilization itself and the burning of anything (as long, of course, as their own lifestyle was preserved), energy producers that saw in this the opportunity to triple or quadruple their profits by creating artificial scarcity of a plentiful resource, politicians that saw in this the opportunity to raise taxes, get elected on a world-saving “issue”, and perhaps line their own pockets along the way, and a United Nations that saw an opportunity to transform it into a way to tax the rich nations and transfer money to developing nations (while again lining various pockets along the way)...

Funny how that works isn't it?  He who pays the piper, calls the tune.

Even completely ethical scientists have to eat, and if the only way they can eat is to get funded, and the only way they can get funded is to submit proposals that seek to prove that CO_2 is bad, guess what they will propose to study? And if they want to get funded AGAIN, guess what they will find? Climate science has been effectively corrupted beyond any hope of objectivity.

Amen. I've seen that in action. Virtually all RFPs in the biological or ecological sciences list carbon cycling and climate change issues, and increasingly strained connections to ecological harm as potential subjects of interest. And they're not looking for tales of how the warmer weather will make things flourish. They want to know how things will get worse. And that's how you get sad tales about chickadees moving north of some magic road.

I would venture a guess that most of the research devoted to global warming does not study whether or not global warming (in the anthropogenic sense) is real, but rather assumes it is real, and goes on to find changes that can be blamed on it.