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The market economy is not the only arena of human interaction to experience booms and busts. Science is another. We argue that government policies and funding as well as the emergence of a scientific "Big Player" that has aggressively championed the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW),* 1 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have together fomented a boom in climate science that began in the early 1990s and has grown markedly over the past decade.
Recent science booms (and ensuing busts) in the United States include the boom in space science and some related disciplines in the aftermath of the Sputnik launch in 1957 and the boom in computer science prompted by the Japanese "Fifth Generation" project in 1984. These phenomena were relatively short-lived, and the busts came when political interest (and funding) waned because the purported crisis was no longer seen as a pressing concern. More comparable to the situation in climate science would be the long-lasting scientific booms in eugenics and nutrition science.2 The eugenics boom, although very adequately funded, came to an end with the exposure of the eugenics-inspired atrocities committed by the Nazis, and the nutrition science boom has slowly (and quietly) given way to the gradual accumulation of empirical evidence difficult to fit within the government-favored hypothesis. In both of these cases, the object of scientific study was, like the climate (and the economy), a complex system that was not susceptible to the precision of empirical testing possible on simpler physical systems.
Evidence for an ongoing climate science boom can be seen in figure 1, showing the trend in published climate science papers,3 and in figure 2, showing the trend in the level of U.S. federal government funding of climate science research and development (R&D), initially via the National Climate Program Office and later via the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Whether this boom is sustainable or not is another matter; we argue here that there are strong indications that it is artificial and unsustainable, but we offer no predictions of the nature or the timing of the bust.
Our exposition of the causes and consequences of the climate science boom proceeds as follows:
(a) We invoke the economic theory of the Big Player and indicate...