alt Hacker News> It's much like climate science today: any dissent at all, even just questioning the predictions of catastrophe, immediately brands you as a heretic.
I think this is not a great example, as there’s a huge group of people that, in fact, does not agree with the consensus and would happily fund research that (tries to) prove otherwise.
I fully agree with your point, though, just not the example.
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That’s not true. If you want to have a job at a prestigious institution then the research committees are pretty consistent in their biases.
Over the past decades the group that are not happy with the AGW consensus in the hard earth sciences crowd have principally funded FUD via think tanks, ala the pro-tobacco lobby back in the day, rather than research.
The few examples of research driven from the skeptic PoV (eg: urban heat skewing, etc) have landed on the side of the AGW consensus.
having worked in amyloid, and in an a-beta lab in the second half of the 2000s, we always said under our breath in group meetings that we were skeptical about the amyloid hypothesis, but our grant applications certainly did not say that (or if they did it was a quick throwaway sentence). And I think the lab that I landed in was one of the most honest scientific labs in biochemistry/chemical biology.