I should have been a bin man

The latest IPCC assessment report is out today, which means that a lot of scientists fly around the world in order to go to a conference and tell everybody that they should stop flying around the world. It also means the re-igniting the usual tedious debates about whether or not climate change is real or a conspiracy of flag-burning unwashed bolsheviks to take away every man's God-given right to drive the kid's to school in a V8. I refuse to enter these debates now, since the issue of climate change is like party politics - everybody decided twenty years ago what side of the fence they stood on, and any new information is hailed as startling validation of both sides' policy.

Aside from the poorly-argued scientific debates, there is an absolutely mendacious argument from skeptics that we made it all up to generate cash for ourselves. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) was a particular fan of this one. Just out of interest, I wonder how much money these people think we make? The current salary of a US Senator is about $165,000 pa (that's before a couple of non-executive directorships, some nice incentives from the lobbyists and a pretty sweet pension scheme). That's about the same as an extremely succesful scientist in a top position after 30-40 years of research. More realistically, the average researcher at, say, NCAR, or a tenured professor at a Well-Known West Coast University can expect to top out at around the $70,000 mark. This is in America, which is considered to be the land of milk and honey as far as academic pay-scales are concerned.

I could be earning a packet, you know. I could be on Wall Street or The City trading in weather-based derivatives, or working for an insurance company doing long-term risk assessment. A bit of pressure maybe, a bit less sexy when chatting up someone in a Hollywood bar, but at least I'd get weekends off and a decent Christmas bonus. Instead I'm in the lab on yet another friday evening, whilst fuckers like Bill O'Reilly accuse me of fudging the numbers to keep the insurance premium going on my brand new Jaguar.

Sod this, I'm going to contact AEI for a job.