Government funded research?

Given your two assumptions, the simple answer would be to pull all research funds that are currently going into climate science and put it into other research projects.

I don't think removing 'all federal tax dollars from research' would make any sense. Government has its place in many roles. For one, there are a lot of useful research endeavors that can't easily turn into a profit, but which can help many people. I can't imagine any private company undertaking such a project.

Even for those that can turn profits like GPS or internet, cutting off government-funded research completely might create a *small* boost in private sector R&D, but to assume private companies would totally 'take over' is to assume that the only barrier to more private R&D right now is direct competition with government. But such an assumption implies:

--Everything that could be researched in the world is already being researched

--There cannot be two groups independently researching the same thing at the same time

--There are not in fact dozens of other factors influencing how much capital a given business puts into R&D (limited budget, desire to invest in other areas, arbitrary will of the management boards, etc)

All three of which would be pretty silly arguments to make.

And without question we should make an effort to anticipate potential changes. The nature of some problems means they must be attempted to be foreseen and prevented ahead of time, because fixing them after the fact shows to be far more difficult and expensive than preventing them. Anyone who agrees that it's a good idea to stay awake while driving should understand that.

Space exploration. The space project created many technologies now used everyday by common people the worl over. It is argued that the Economic Dominance of the USin the 1970's - 1980's was in large part due to reserach that came directly out of the space program.

If we put significant funds into this including the 100 year spaceship concept then it would surprise almost anyone how beneficial the technical developments could be.

By the way new theory shows that a Warp Drive might actual be possible with energy requirements within our current abilities to produce!!!

Imagine if we were able to start actively mining the asteroid belt. Total wealth of or the world would be dramatically increased. The first nation taht is capable of doing this will become the next dominant economic power on Earth. If a second third and fourth nation are not able to quickly follow suit, then that first nation would rapid dominate the globe in many more ways than mere economics.

This is the way that human history has worked since the begginning of time. Here are some small examples to consider.

Greek Civilization - Powerful navy expanded thorughout the mediiteranean and elements of greek culture spread at that time still dominate the western world.

British Empire - Powerful navy - became the economic leader of theworld at the time. English today is the most widely spoken language in the world. Several nations which due to multiple native tongues use english as their formal national language due in large part to this fact. (Phillipines and India for example)

There are many other examples. China and the Middle kingdom - perio of growth and prosperity Large trading fleets etc. Alexander the Great and the development of the phalanx. Roman empire and the first professional military of the period.

Naitons with technical leadership frame the world and the human experience. Naitons that fail to lead become footnotes in history.

The NSA and other government defense budgets continue to fund many technology-based startup companies today, a practice that has been in place for decades.

Much science has been influenced by the government push. Look how many products were developed by NASA just to beat the Russians to the moon. Also, both fission and fusion were developed for military application. Many biological weapons have yielded discoveries in the structure and prevention of disease and bacterae; this is still a very controversial subject, as many people believe HIV was a mutated result of 2 biological precursors developed by the US DOD. For many years, until AIDS became very common, there were 2 precursor items in the US bio weapons catalog; both carried the description "...result of attempts to create a virus to which no known human immunity exists." and when you look at their molecular structure, they each happen to represent about half of the HIV virus structure. Certain government institutions have had a long history of infecting its own citizens with various diseases, sicknesses and viruses. This is actually fact, you can look up several cases that the CIA has actually admitted to in recent years, so this isn't just a conspiracy thing. Many believe that the government, likely the CIA, was used to secretly give certain groups of people these virus precursors during immunizations in order to see how they behave in the body. The running theory is that these two precursor virus structures are harmless on their own because they lacked the ability to fully replicate and mutate within the body, but that during the 1960s and 1970s, they were injected into homosexual men in the notorious Castro District of San Francisco, California, which was established (much to the government's chagrin and embarrassment) after homosexual service men returned from WWII and settled together in the same area in order to have a political voice and support. (This sort of discriminatory testing has happened before in black neighborhoods too, once during the 1930s with syphilis; this is a widely known factual event admitted by the government). So the theory is that these precursors, which were unrelated and seen as relatively harmless at the time, were given to men, and that eventually two men came together, each with one of the precursors, and the conditions were just right for the two halves to come together and then mutate over time into HIV and then AIDS. Of course, during the early 1990s the two precursors just happened to vanish from the bio weapons catalogue but I copies persist.

I don't think the government push is necessarily a requirement but it surely doesn't hurt. The thing is that private institutions have so many hurdles to jump through, because of government. But they are more efficient as a result. Whereas government has less hurdles but is much less efficient, at least unless some massive goal, like beating the Russians, is present. Therefore, if there were some way to combine the efficiency of private industry together with the reach and motivation behind government, discovery would be essentially limitless.

And response to 2:

I would disagree, you may think so because you hear so much about it. But actually it is quite misunderstood still, and there is a massive amount of data we need to gather in order to truly combat it. In general the climatic patterns of the world, although based on simple properties and processes, is extremely varied, rapidly changing and complex. So to understand something that affects the entire earth all at once is going to take more time, effort and money.

That being said, if I had to choose between putting money into studying global warming or taking measures against it, I would go for the latter. People dont realize how quickly things are going to change. We are so unwilling to change and to be honest, I don't think we have much longer here as an advanced society. I give society another 400-500 years tops before we overreach carrying capacity and massive collapse ensues. Then, within probably a thousand years, the ice age will resume, and I don't feel as if human beings are still hardy enough to adapt to such a rapid environmental change, which we accelerated. Therefore, I say start pouring the money into getting us off this planet, or we will surely meet extinction sooner or later. The problem is it will require a massive expenditure and whatever society pays for it will launch it and never ever see it again, so such a project will be the most expensive gift in history, but it will ultimately be the only thing to keep us alive as a species and break the Earth's historical model of extinction events.

There are certain things that need government support such as Mars exploration. There is military technology involved and not appropriate for private enterprise. For example, I wouldn't want Tehran to have that ability. Still, much of that technology is private and it relies on private companies building the parts with contracts from the federal government. The same thing can be said of GPS and nuclear energy.

I don't see why genetics needs to have much government funding. Too often government funding comes with restrictions. Just look at Government Motors. They are trying to get out from under the thumb of the government so they can hire people that will make them competitive but Obama won't let them.

With AGW, government funding feeds the alarmist industry. Those studies that conclude something alarming are favored and eventually you have a survival of the shrillest. I don't have any problem with the government funding some science but I don't like those who try to use science for their own political agenda. Trying to fund those studies that exaggerate a threat so it can be used for a petty political agenda isn't a proper use of government funds.

Note:

Can I imagine private industry undertaking this research? You have to be kidding me. Aren't you aware of the trillions spent on health care? Where the government can help, I don't have a problem. Too often they want to have strings tied. Those who pretended that fetal stem cells were the end all are a good example of how politics gets in the way of actual science.

Here is a small example of some other interests presumably some private

The Human Genome Project originally aimed to map the nucleotides contained in a human haploid reference genome (more than three billion). Several groups have announced efforts to extend this to diploid human genomes including the International HapMap Project, Applied Biosystems, Perlegen, Illumina, J. Craig Venter Institute, Personal Genome Project, and Roche-454.

If I was an American, I would want NASA to be converted back to its original purpose and properly funded for space exploration. And yes, that would include lots of research.

Edit: After reading Peter J's answer, I need to clarify that I believe the private sector has a part to play in space research and development. Maybe some partnerships should be drawn up.

I am the CEO of a private research lab that receives government grants and contracts in Canada. My company funds about 70% of the research and government grants fund 30%. We expect to make a profit on our 70% and provide the public "shareholder by taxation" a profit too. Small private companies like mine will not invest much in basic research because the benefits of basic research often go to larger companies that already dominate the market. A small company like mine will invest in R&D that has a good probability of producing a commercially significant patent. We do market research before the scientific research so that we at least know in advance that there is a market if something useful results from the research. Sept. 12 I gave at talk at a local college to business students outlining several possible research projects to extend IP already held by my company. The students will produce business plans for two of the research projects and I will decide whether to proceed based on the business plans. However, my company does benefit from basic research done in academia in two ways. First, some of the results are serendipitously useful. I am using optics developed for pure research (astronomy) in a medical device. Secondly, pure research trains scientists and builds up a body of expertise that can be directed toward applied projects later. Large companies will invest in basic research because they are interested in expanding a market that they already dominate. However, large companies are not as efficient or focused as smaller companies at conducting research (too many managers and too much deadwood). The upper management in large companies know that they are inefficient operationally and buy R&D from smaller more efficient companies. A good strategy for shareholders of a small R&D company is to make the small company a takeover target for a larger company.

The US should continue to invest in R&D. Statistically the return on investment in R&D to the economy as a whole is about 20%. The cost of borrowing is less than 20% so research is a good investment. The public needs a well diversified portfolio of research projects so that the winners more than pay for the losers. Research funding is most effectively spent on small projects (<$1 M) divided between as many small private companies and university labs as possible. Big budget projects tend to have too much overhead. Research funds should be spent on scientists and engineers rather than bean counters. The public benefits from R&D in two ways. First, R&D creates employment directly and indirectly through new industries generated. Secondly, R&D expands the economy and broadens the tax base.

Of course the private sector would take over.

There are private sector companies working on space research -- their biggest obstacle other than physics is the FAA and NASA.

There are amazing things coming in technical gadgetry, all done with private research. (yes, you'll have a HD laser projector embedded in your cell phone in a year or so.)

There also seems to be this assumption by those in favor of government research, that somehow a lack of government money for research would stifle useful research. I disagree completely. Recently we saw video of some government funded research having shrimp on treadmills. If this were privately funded... they would have to answer one important question: what possible gain can there be from this research? If there's no good answer then it probably shouldn't be funded.

Edit:

Of of the errors that is probably made most often by those who support government intervention, and government spending on research is they consider only what they can see, and ignore what is unseen.

For example, in central California, there are huge desert areas that are irrigated, and the proponents of government meddling say "see?! look at all these vegetables we were able to grow with government help manipulating water flow." What they can't show you is how much cheaper those same vegetables would have been if they were grown in East Texas or Mississippi where they don't have manipulate the water supply.

So, on cell phones -- so what? We might well have something far superior to current cellphones if the government had stayed out of it. We'd certainly have better progress on efficient lighting by now if government hadn't mandate the poisonous CFL bulbs and allowed the private sector exert more of its efforts to the more efficient LEDs.

So, if government weren't imposing certain types of pollution controls and certain limits on fuel economy, we would probably have significantly more efficient cars now than we do... (you can get vehicles in Europe that exceed 90 mpg that are illegal in the US.) -- is that beneficial to us, or a hindrance?

Denialists love to say that global warming is about to be disproven. If global warming research ended today, that would guarantee that AGW is never disproven. All that we have is the research to date, which says, global warming is happening

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/images/wa...

And we are causing it

http://planetsave.com/2010/08/18/humans-cause-glob...

Dookie

Not now, I'm in the middle of a Rothschild's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb3jAtSzSrs

2) BRING IT ON !!!!!!!!!!!

=> This would just send all the brilliant US minds to other countries where they are not bullied and considered for their scientific outputs independantly from any political activism

=> YES give over NOAA to Japan, Germany, Brazil, India or whoever. Then these countries will go down in history for providing the needed understanding of one of the most pressing issues in the world

=> YES DO IT there are similar cases...

remember when the US dropped the PV industry? (thank you Reagan)

remember when the US dropped the windpower industry (thank you Ronnie again)

One thing I love about the US, is how it is populated with.....

I would like to see more studies on what makes gay men more likely to be a top or bottom.