The latest Australian Research Council grants were approved this week by Science Minister Kim Carr. Noted scientific researcher Andrew Bolt has taken a look at the recipients’ projects and discovered that the bulk of Australia’s researchers haven’t cottoned on to the best way to guarantee yourself an easy funding stream.
According to Andrew getting research funding is dead easy
Want a surefire way to get a grant – maybe $300,000, or even more – for your university research?
Then gather around, my dear professors, and say these magic words.
Climate change.
If only everyone realised how easy it was. Andrew’s undeniable proof for his hypothesis? Of this year’s 1136 grants, the number of them that mentioned climate change was a whopping ten per-cent.
This information concerns me. What I’d like to know is, if mentioning climate change is a surefire way to get funding, and the recipients of these grants are some of the best and brightest academics that our nation has, why on earth did the other ninety per-cent fail to include mention of it in their submissions?
According to Andrew
How well they understand the far-Left Kim “Il” Carr’s fierce need to have all scientists sing the Rudd Government’s hymn of global warming doom. How closely they heeded his decision to make climate change research this year a “priority”.
But it seems that 90% of ARC grant recipients aren’t switched enough to get the message. That leaves us with two very interesting possibilities, either 1022 ARC grant recipients are too dumb to follow Andrew’s funding recommendations, or alternatively, we have a well balanced research funding system, unaffected by political interference.
What do you think?

55 Comments
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You are wicked Gavin. You’ve obviously got confessions fooled.
I don’t need to do more reading confessions,
I can sit you in a room with a dozen people, give a message to the first person and by the tme it gets to the last there is a high probability that the wording and the meaning will have significantly changed — that’s proven fact, now magnify that over thousands of years and you will understand why I have little faith in oral history.
Just because an aboriginal person tells me their history doesn’t mean that that person is telling me the correct thing — he or she is telling me what they remember of being told by someone else, who got it verbally from someone before them, going down through generations – likelihood of inaccuracy ? Extremely high.
‘That’s one example of thousands Gavin.”
The aboriginals were nomads confessions, they didn’t have farms or crops they stayed in one area until the food was gone then moved to the next returning again the next season when the food sources returned.
None of which has anything to do with my questioning these grants — its not just the one involving the aboriginal group in SA that I’m wondering about.
What I’m questioning is the reason for the use of the term “climate change” on studies which don’t appear to have relevance to it, there are more on the list than just the 2 I mentioned here as examples.
If it were a game of chinese whispers, discussing trivialities you might have a point. Oral history however, where significant events or social mores are passed from one generation to another is not like chinese whispers.
My point isn’t about the holocaust per se, I’m merely stating the fact that oral accounts of historical facts surrounding jewish persecution are discounted by holocaust deniers (and stolen generations deniers) using the exact same arguments you make: that a person’s recollection of what happened to them or their families cannot be relied upon as evidence. Utterly false.
“in medieval times most people believed the Earth was flat”
This is not true.
“there was no awareness of “global climate change””
Perhaps not as we conceive of it, represented by scientific models, graphs, tree-ring samples, ice-core drilling etc. However we know that climate change contributed to the demise of the Norse colonies in the North Atlantic. The people living there would have understood ‘climate change’ but just not expressed the idea with modern terminology.
If you want specific examples of evidence, try contacting the researchers. Presumably they have access to more evidence and resources than either of us.
For GavinM – I’m not what I would consider an overly smart person. I am far from being a great, or good, academic. I do not have the flair to make stupidity look intelligent, as you seem to have.
What I do have – is the ability to accept that not everything is black and white, the ability to understand that history goes beyond what can be printed, proven and accepted by mediocre minds which posses an inability to accept anything they are unable to read, see, touch or smell.
Do yourself a favour and read from the link below which, and I quote ‘work on oral histories, Dreamtime stories, rock art, artefacts and ceremonial body painting as well as written accounts by white missionaries, surveyors, settlers, anthropologists and explorers’ regarding how the Dreamtime and oral accounts can be used with validity.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1590192.htm
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