Posted by Dee Norris
This article concerning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry caught my attention this morning:
Twenty years ago, Douglas Prasher was one of the driving forces behind research that earned a Nobel Prize in chemistry this week. But today, he’s just driving.
Prasher, 57, works as a courtesy shuttle operator at a Huntsville, Ala., Toyota dealership. While his former colleagues will fly to Stockholm in December to accept the Nobel Prize and a $1.4 million check, the former Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist will be earning $10 an hour while trying to put two of his children through college.
Shuttle driver reflects on Nobel snub – Cape Cod TImes
Are we starving science research in other areas to pursue accelerated and possibly needless research into Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the dire consequences of AGW at the expense of other more productive and beneficial areas of study?
We have recently heard from Richard A. Muller justifying the distortions and untruths of Al Gore (I guess if the untruths were committed willingly, one could call them LIES) as necessary to stir the public to combat AGW, but at the same time are these tactics shifting funding away from more deserving science projects?
While it was perfectly within his rights not to share the cloned gene with others, Prasher said he felt an obligation to give his research a chance to turn into something significant, even if he was no longer a part of it.
“When you’re using public funds, I personally believe you have an obligation to share,” Prasher said.
How many researchers like Douglas Prasher are under-employed while others like Hansen and Mann receive lecture fees and yet continue to obfuscate data and research paid for by public funds simply to protect their ’empires’?
Your guess is as good as mine, but I ask if spending money on research the explore to the link between global warming and kidney stones really a good use of a limited resource?
In a final thought, I hope some research facility sees this article and offers Doug a job that pays better than $10 an hour. Clearly, he is a more deserving scientist than many of the AGW researchers.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Kum, did you notice I live in Calgary? I’ve had several jobs in the oil patch. My current job takes me all over that area: Fort Mac, Grande Prairie, etc. I fly over and drive through it regularly.
There is no “environmental disaster”.
I have to assume that you have never seen the natural state of that area. THERE’S an environmental disaster. Trees grow crooked, there is very little ground cover, little viable soil, the lakes and ponds have a film of oil. It reeks of oil. You can even smell it when you fly over Athabasca in a Dash-8 (prop plane, typically at 24,000 feet). That is the NATURAL state. There is little farming in the area as a combination of it being too far north and soaked in oil.
We go in, extract what is useful, and leave an area with topsoil and a clean environment. Just because some envirowackos get some pictures of the dirtiest operations and try to convince everyone that the whole area is like that does not in any way make it so.
This year big news was made when some ducks drowned in an open tailings pond. Big deal. More ducks were shot by hunters the same day in the same area. I wonder how many ducks were killed the same day at the wind farm a few miles south of me… but I know that will NEVER be reported.
The tar sands are worth billions of barrels, not millions. A significant portion of that is extractable using CURRENT technology, developed at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, and the rest is likely extractable using future developments.
Kum (09:27:59) So this is what it has come down to, lobbyist spin? Why am I not surprised.
====================================
Just in case anyone’s still checking this topic… my post above should have said TRILLIONS, not billions. Estimated oil in the tar sands ranges between 1.2 and 2.5 trillion barrels.
This is one of the reasons the envirowackos are fighting so hard against oilsands development.
[…] Global Warming Starving Science? Is Global Warming Starving Science? « Watts Up With That? I wonder what kind of scientific breakthroughs we’re missing out on because of the focus on […]