Don't you think you're pulling a fast one here ? Climate change denial = business ?

I mean do you read stuff like the BBC ? Business is VERY pro-AGW these days. I get a strong impression it is actually academia who are turning more and more anti-AGW.

And it is trivially true that this carbon trading scheme has put a LOT of money on the AGW bandwagon. A hell of a lot. Over 150 billion I believe.

Reminds me of an old physics joke.

The increase in the number of scientific journals means that the rate at which library shelf space is being taken up will soon exceed the speed of light. This doesn't violate the theory of relativity however as there is no information being transmitted.

But on a more serious note, back in the day I did some research and went to some conferences, and I found most of them to be rather tedious. You did have the opportunity to network with people, and this is valid in itself, I guess.

We used to have problems with government bureaucracy as well. For example, to measure your performance they would simply count up the number of papers you published, with no attempt being made to try and establish whether the papers were substantive in any way. Thus if we had just finished a set of measurements we would split things up and write several papers that essentially covered the same thing but with minor differences, and each paper might focus on a different aspect of the thing. I can't completely blame the government bean-counters for this though - the academics that we worked with had idiotic beancounters that were watching over their shoulders as well. After a while it sapped all of my energies...