Those government, in turn, tend also to support AGW theory.
Because that's what the scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates. However, most governments balk at the scientific findings and have dragged their heels for decades to address it, because they are mostly beholden to industrial interests. The Trump administration is the pinnacle of that. By your absurd and deeply intellectually dishonest reasoning, U.S. scientists will now start churning out anti-AGW studies because that's what Trump wants. (The reality is that Trump is proceeding to shut down all funding of climate science research because he doesn't want to hear what that research concludes. Thus,
http://www.attn.com/stories/14460/h...cuing-climate-data-during-trumps-inauguration)
"please spare us any lecture on the virtue of governments in general"
This sort of strawman admonition is consistent with and demonstrative of the deep fundamental intellectual dishonesty of your sort. I'm surprised that you didn't just come right out and damn me as a "statist".
is it not also possible that AGW proponents are funded by governments to come to a conclusion that the governments desire?
Many things are
possible, but what you need is argument and evidence. It's funny -- and deeply intellectually dishonest -- that you equate the proven certainty that the FF industry funds "dissent" with a mere
possibility that ... what, that every single one of the tens of thousands of scientists working in numerous disciplines related to climate science have faked their results? And it's not just government scientists, but the military, the insurance industry and particularly the reinsurance industry (there is plenty of material on this if you can be bothered to look, e.g.,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesco...ng-we-dont-about-global-warming/#42c168af1f23,
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-linden-insurance-climate-change-20140617-story.html) and even Exxon's own scientists who Exxon's documents prove they squelched. By calling scientists "AGW proponents", you have created a circular argument, assuming your conclusion that they are "proponents", when mostly they are just trying to figure out how the world works -- that's why people become scientists. (If they were out to make a lot of money by fudging research, they would do far better to work for the FF industry ... where the money would actually go into their pockets; grant money doesn't. It's funny how "free market" folks come up with ridiculous theories that totally contradict the law of supply and demand and their own [disproven] notions about people being "rational agents" driven to maximize their wealth.) Scientists don't simply come to conclusions, they do research, present evidence, go through peer review; the conclusions follow from the research, not v.v. The conclusions are challenged by other scientists, who are motivated to overturn them. Your whole framework here is deeply intellectually dishonest and shows no familiarity with how science is actually done. (
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...iven-reveal-ignorance-of-how-science-is-done/) Anyone who could validly disprove the massive, overwhelming, multidisciplinary evidence in support of AGW would be rolling in grant money and would be up for a Nobel Prize. Just a small amount of that overwhelming evidence is presented in the links I provided that spnnr dismissed with an ad hominem fallacy (the real kind, that attacks the character of the source of an argument rather than addressing the content of the argument), and there is far far more if you could be bothered to look at it rather indulge in such ridiculous talk of what is
possible. Yes, it's possible, just as it's possible that I'm the Duke of Earl. Now let's see you do the research to overturn any of the findings of climate science. It's
possible that you could, but it's far more
likely that you deny the conclusions of science merely because you don't want them to be true. Well, no one wants them to be true, but they are.
For ideas of how you could win your Nobel Prize, start with
http://www.realclimate.org/index.ph...ncreases-are-due-to-human-activities-updated/
Maybe try doing some research the refutes the evidence of carbon isotope signatures that points directly to human industrial activity. You might need to bone up on some basic chemistry first.
But it's easier to remain completely ignorant of every aspect of this subject and instead absurdly wave your hands about the
possibility that the thousands upon thousands of peer reviewed research articles and all the satellite and buoy and ground station data and the basic physics of greenhouse gases that has been known since Tinsdale and Arrhenius can all be dismissed as sucking up to government research grants.
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...sts-push-the-consensus-its-not-for-the-money/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_conspiracy_theory
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/03/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-are-wrong/
http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/19/1...tion-science-politics-climate-change-vaccines
http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/...of-climate-science-takes-down-the-denialists/
