Advocates of AGW (CO2-alarmist AKA catastrophic human-caused global-warming) have several agendas and objectives.  I'd say the primary objective is to justify establishment of a "totalitarian world government", which indeed has been established in Copenhagen by the powers-that-be.  Their *stated* plan is to collect a 2% "tax" (theft) on every country, starting with the USSA, UK and EU countries - to fund their totally non-democratic "global government", which has zero protections or rights for anyone.  This turns the entire population of earth (eventually) literally into a "slave planet" controlled by the elitist gangster-banksters (the cretins who control central banks worldwide).

This is *not* a theory.  This is clearly stated on the documents they have been producing for several decades (and arguably for hundreds of years).

If Hoenstann believes that concern over  climate change is merely something being fostered by some sort of government conspiracy, then what objective does he ascribe to it?  If it's intended to inspire some upsurge in U.S. industry, why isn't the U.S. government more interested in funding programs to that end?  Indeed, the government offers little incentive to green innovation.

Honestann:

I think you have taken a rather extreme stance on government-funded research and perhaps conflated it with a different issue. First, most research is never important enough in its early stages to induce researchers to meaningfully bias their research. Probably 99% of research is done at a level that doesn’t make anyone care enough to engage in bad behavior. The consequence is two-fold. First, most of the research gets strong vetting for being correct (the well established self-correcting aspect of searching for how nature works since nature doesn’t care about each scientist’s personal foibles). This is especially true as the significance of the research escalates and other research groups actually need to know that their starting point is true. Second, sometimes the obscurity of a particular line of inquiry does allow a lone researcher to get away with sloppy work and “control” the story. But once again, if the work is important enough, the self-correcting mechanism comes into play. Science is now complex enough that it could not be done with private funds as Honestann proposes. But since government-funded science provides the foundation for more important work to occur, it is vital for progress.

The issue that Honestann really is addressing is the intersection between the development of public policy and science. Ultimately, a new line of scientific inquiry will generate something important to humanity. Sometimes this occurs early in a new line of inquiry, perhaps long before the reality is established with absolute clarity. I believe that the global warming story is one of these situations but there are many other examples. Once the need to make policy decisions enters the picture, then the problem can become politicized at all levels. The global warming issue is perhaps one of the largest global public policy issues one can find (almost by definition). In my opinion, it is also one of the youngest sciences around. The tools for developing the empirical data are only recently available (established and cross-calibrated global climate monitoring instrumentation) and the tools for understanding its significance not even fully developed (computer models). And yet the science is being asked to weigh in with certitude on policy decisions that have serious global impact. In these situations, the behavior of individuals is stressed and the normal balancing mechanisms of good science are potentially too slow to be useful. I have no doubt that given enough time, the science of global climate change will become solid enough to provide clear answers but the world wants answers now and it is this pressure that has distorted all aspects of this issue. It also leads to some individual or small group mis-behavior.