If as a scientist you had to perform GW research "out of pocket"?

Question

and be subject to ridicule would you still do it? Bear in mind your professors would single you out in class, flag your papers most likely flunk you and you would instead labour "in the boonies" for years until vindicated.

In other words, are you a leader or a follower?

Answer 1

No way, there is simply not adequate evidence.

Answer 2

I'd do it, since I believe strongly in finding out the facts about how our planet's climate works.

Their are scientists out there that are still working on constructing a picture of the past, which is the most important thing to understanding both the present and the future of our planet.

The safe bet would be to become a geologist, since they are the once delving into our planet's history and helping to paint a clear picture of our planet's future.

Answer 3

I can think of a published scientist like that, Steve McIntyre.  He has found lots of errors by the warmers and they hate him for it but his blog was voted the best science blog of 2007.

http://climateaudit.org

Answer 4

Global warming "skeptics" don't have to do this.  Richard Lindzen has no problems getting grant money, nor do other legitimate scientific "skeptics".  Their numbers are few, but they're doing fine.

They've been shown to be wrong, but that's another issue.

Answer 5

Really, your question demonstrates you are utterly clueless as to how funding in science operates.  Have you ever written a research proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation?  How about to the Office of Naval Research?  EPA? NIH?  NASA?  Anywhere?  

Good science gets funded, mostly, and bad science doesn't.  If I had a good idea that didn't align with "prevailing wisdom" somebody would fund it.  I might not get much at first, but if the results panned out and were credible I would continue to get funding.  In some cases you might have to adapt your research goals into a different question to get started, but you could get things funded.  

Doing basic research now requires the ability to see how the things you want to understand are relevant to ongoing major programs.  Take a look at something like the Surface Ocean Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS), a major international research program.  There is work going on that is funded under SOLAS that addresses "skeptic" issues (e.g., is deep convection in the equatorial warm pool increasing and mitigating the radiative forcing from CO2?).  

Funding agencies have an extremely strong bias towards funding things that are scientifically valid.  If you're a whack job claiming CO2 doesn't provide a radiative forcing, you're not going to get funded because that is wrong.  If you have a theory that the radiative forcing from CO2 is unimportant because of some credible arguments on global cooling mechanisms, you would probably get funded to study that issue if the research you proposed was realistic.  

Anyway, your question is quite loaded, clearly most of the "skeptics" do not do research in the classic sense and they certainly don't do what they do in the "boonies."  In fact, most of them seem to be motivated by the public notoriety rather than any sense of scientific integrity or courage.  Nobody would ever have heard of Sallie Balliunis, Willie Soon, Tim Ball, or any of the other skeptics if they weren't so publicly vocal because their real publication record is so very thin.