Why do they waste ink on this idiot?

The local Murdoch paper's favourite rabble-rouser, Andrew Bolt, is at it again. (note: throughout this post, quotes in italics are from that article). Now I normally just ignore the ranting of idiots, but this time his ill-informed spoutings are a little bit closer to home, in that he's taking pot-shots at academic researchers who are incorporating some mention of climate change into their grant proposals, in the hope of getting hold of a few dollars to do some research with. (Disclaimer: I am one such researcher, and actually won a grant in the particular funding round that he's ranting about here - but not for anything climate-change related, so mine isn't one of the ones mentioned).

Now, to back-pedal a step or two, this really isn't actually the fault of the researchers: when writing a grant proposal for the Australian Research Council, you are asked to categorise it according to a list of National Research Priorities - which are areas that the government has decided are important things for Australia to research. Climate change is one of the entries on the list, but it's one of many - and, for example, "Advanced Materials" and "Frontier Technologies to Transform Australian Industry" are two others. Bolt is outraged that 10% of grant proposals, in areas ranging from history to hard sciences, are addressing the issue of climate change, and accuses the academics of being "those cunning academics. Those wind-sniffers.", or "the whole hooting, hollering and repent-repent! gimme-cash crowd?. Yes, Mr Bolt, that's right, we're being cunning because we are able to follow the instructions laid out by the government - which have actually not changed significantly in the 5 or so years that I've been writing such proposals - to focus on areas that are identified as being important. Yes, Bolt is a climate-change denier - it's not even accurate to call him a skeptic, he's not so ambivalent or open-minded as that - but he spouts off about that on a fairly regular basis, and I've never bothered to try to argue with him before. As they say, "never argue with an idiot - he'll bring you down to his own level and then beat you with experience"...

Oh, and by the way: those grants that got funded were just barely over 20% of the applications that were lodged, and the average funding level was about 60% of what was requested. So, the whole thing could hardly be described as a "surefire way to get a grant" - it's at best a way to try to provide a little bit of baseline funding to support a research group while seeking out bigger pools of money through industrially-sponsored research or other avenues. A reasonably large 'Discovery' grant (which is the name of this scheme) is just barely enough to pay the salary costs of one postdoc and one PhD student for 3 years, with no extensions allowed - not exactly "scramble on to this greatest of gravy trains" territory..! It's a pretty cut-throat environment, and something that academics work incredibly hard for - so it's really quite offensive to see someone with (as usual) no idea of what he's talking about, spouting off in that sort of way. Worse still, most of the commenters on his blog seem to agree with him. And unfortunately, these people vote. Guess this is how Pauline Hanson got into parliament...