I'd be curious to read these, if you have links.
Sure, I will get you some links. For obvious reasons, such stories don't make the big news, but I will dig some up for you. In the meantime, here is an interview conducted with Professor Pat Michaels, Dr. Roy Spencer, Dr. Sherwood Idso, Professor Tom Wigley, and Professor Reginald Newell on the topic of funding.
This is not just a group of skeptics. They are well respected. Professor Michaels, for example is one of the most popular speakers in the world on the topic of global warming. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama and he has been Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He also recieved NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. Dr. Idso is the President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Professor Newell was a professor of meterology at MIT and Professor Wigley is a senior scientist in the National Center for for Atmospheric Research Climate and Global Dynamics Division, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his major contributions to climate and carbon-cycle modeling and to climate data analysis.
"THE WEATHER MACHINE" (BBC 1, November 1974): There's the ever-present threat of a big freeze. Will a new ice age claim our lands and bury our northern cities? It's buried Manhattan Island before when great glaciers half a mile thick filled the valley of New York's Hudson River.
INTERVIEWER: You do accept that 10-15 years ago people were talking about global cooling, not warming?
DR STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Not everybody - I was one who was not sure.
INTERVIEWER: You say you didn't believe in global cooling but in your first book you said, 'I have cited many examples of recent climatic variability and repeated the warnings of several well-known climatologists that a cooling trend has set in, perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age. Well, that was just fourteen years ago.
DR STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: I said that because at the time it was true. But you've got to be honest, you've got to tell things the way they are. I don't mind people quoting what I said in the 1970s.
INTERVIEWER: Doesn't all of that add up to saying that you're asking governments to spend billions of dollars on a view which is different from one you held a decade ago?
DR STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: I don't see any problem in saying that people learn. I'm not embarrassed about a view I held a decade ago.
PROF. PAT MICHAELS: You should remember, when I was going to graduate school, it was gospel that the ice age was about to start. I had trouble warming up to that one too. This is not the first climatic apocalypse, but it' s certainly the loudest.
There may be many reasons why we might want to believe in a apocalypse but for the scientists involved it's very straightforward.
DR ROY SPENCER: It's easier to get funding if you can show some evidence for impending climate disasters. In the late 1970s it was the coming ice age and now it's the coming global warming. Who knows what it will be ten years from now. Sure, science benefits from scary scenarios.
DR SHERWOOD IDSO: A lot of people are getting very famous and very well funded as a result of promoting the disastrous scenario of greenhouse warming.
PROF. REGINALD NEWELL: My suspicion is that if you have a crisis like this it' s easier to gain funds for the profession as a whole.
PROF. TOMWIGLEY: I don't think funding directly influences the nature of the research or the approach. .
INTERVIEWER: But indirectly?
PROF.TOMWIGLEY. Using my organisation as an example, we have only one permanently-funded university scientist that's me. I have a dozen research workers with Ph.D.s who are working in the climatic research unit and they are all funded on so-called soft money. Their existence requires me, or us jointly, to get external support.
Funding may have encouraged support of the greenhouse theory, but if you oppose the theory, life can get difficult.
PROF. REGINALD NEWELL: I was warned when I wrote my first paper which discussed the difference between the climate models and some figures I was looking at for the tropics that it would be very difficult and my funding would probably be cut. In fact it has been cut.
INTERVIEWER: Did you believe that at the time?
PROF. REGINALD NEWELL: No, I thought that the system was so straightforward and honest - that bringing in a new perspective to the whole thing which I thought I did in 1979 would be considered to be a positive thing: people could hear both sides of the argument and then have a debate.
INTERVIEWER: Perhaps the greenhouse theory has been successful in terms of raising funds : by saying there' s a crisis around the corner, people are talking about putting in more funds.
PROF. REGINALD NEWELL: Perhaps it has worked; perhaps I was wrong but I think it's going to backfire.
DR ROY SPENCER: Richard Lindzen has recently said that this whole area has become a new McCarthyism. If you don't jump on the environmental bandwagon to stop the inevitable warming of the Earth, then you will be ostracised from the scientific community and from everybody else's community , because it's not fashionable to disagree with the environmentalists these days.
PROF. PAT MICHAELS : People who have a point of view which may not be politically acceptable are going to have problems. That's not surprising. I have had experiences with editors of more than one journal who have said that my papers have been rejected because they are held to a higher standard of review than others. I believe this is because what they say is not popular. That's OK: I'm a big boy. I know I would have been more successful if I had said the world is coming to an end, but I can't bring myself to do that.
Of course it's not only been the scientists. The media also benefits from a good disaster story.
'THE BIG HEAT' (Panorama, May 1990): Storms, cyclones, drought, high winds and floods: a foretaste of global warming, a change in global climate caused by man's pollution of the planet.
To say that the climate is OK does not usually make the headlines. And the best prophets of doom are the ones filmed most. (Shot of Stephen Schneider being interviewed in front of the cameras).
