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Of the criticisms that climate scientists receive from those skeptical of climate change, the most ridiculous by far is that we are in it for the money. Just ask Michael Tobis, who mocks this claim with the very name of his blog.
My first public talk on climate change was about ten years ago. I was the token graduate student panel with a local religious leader and a very well-known emeritus professor whom I have always held in high regard. A question came from the audience about scientific certainty. The professor said "Scientists are essentially paid to disagree. That's what makes the consensus on climate change so remarkable".
You won't advance far in science by repeating other people's work. If you want to get a grant funded, your proposal needs to pose a new question or challenge existing findings [note: people sometimes claim climate "skeptical" research cannot obtain funding; that's not because there's some cabal, it is because research must have a sound scientific basis and methods in order to get funded]. If you want to get a paper in a top journal like Nature or Science, your results have to be new, different, and important. And if you want to get popular coverage or your results, you need a splashy headline.
Levitt and Dubner made a splash with the first book Freakonomics, by expounding a variety of alternate explanations for societal phenomena. You could say the sales and the recognition was deserved too. It was new, it was smart, and it was based on thorough research. This book, at least the section challenging the science of climate change and the logic of mitigation, is not. The arguments are old, they have been used and refuted countless times before, and the research was clearly lazy (read Romm on this).
This time, the authors are simply getting paid for disagreeing with others.
* feel free to link to more rebuttals in the comments
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