Any number of folks have achnowleged that, nowadays, the surest road to academic funding is to tie your pet subject in with climate change. If, for example, you and your academic buddies want funding to study tourist resort destinations (good work if you can get it), you will have a better chance if you add climate change into the mix.
John Moore did a bit of work with the Google Scholar search engine to find out how many studies referencing, say, surfing, also referenced climate change. It is a lot. When you click through to the searches, you will find a number of the matches are spurious (ie matches to random unrelated links on the same page) but the details of the studies and how climate change is sometimes force-fit is actually more illuminating than the summary numbers.
Does it something about the sorry state of “climate science” when the journal cited, Climate Research, is so hard up for content that they publish what is little more than a test of an unremarkable market research technique using what the authors acknowledge is “non-representative sample” of their “friends and acquaintances”? Ah, but it’s “peer reviewed” no doubt, so it can be added to the wealth of “settled” scientific knowledge we have on the effects of climate change.
Who exactly do you believe funds science, and how exactly do you believe they decide how to allocate money?
Actually real life observations support that theory. The goverment supplies funding to scientific bodies/orginizations who review proposals for grants and decide whom to fund. The trick to get funding is to prove a need for the research. So creative grant proposals with the help of your advisor who will share authorship helps to recieve funding. Of course if your advisor has co-authored a few papers with some one on the funding committee that also helps a whole bunch. The Good Old Boy Network is alive and well in academics.