Over at Dot Earth Andy Revkin points to a call by climate science organizations for a doubling of their current level of funding during the period 2010-2014, asking for almost $20 billion (available here in PDF),as part of the priorities of the next U.S. administration.

The incoherence of the request is remarkable. They invoke Hurricane Katrina as an example of the sort of costly disaster that better models and predictions will help us deal with. However, the forecasts for Katrina were near perfect, and the American Meteorological Society concluded that, “Hurricane Katrina reminds us that even with excellent track forecasts, the United States remains vulnerable to large losses of life from hurricanes.” A large body of research clearly shows that improved forecasts are not the main obstacle to reducing economic or human losses from extreme events, especially in developing countries.

So while it makes sense to invest in the science of modeling and prediction, and maybe even to increase that investment, the transition document fails to make this case. To be fair, now that it has been generally accepted that climate forecasts are plenty good enough for action, we should expect to see a search for new justifications for increased funding, and it will probably take a while for this community to work out the new arguments, as this document indicates.

But if you think that the justifications offered by the climate community are weak, they’ve got a lot of room for additional hyperbole and bad argumentation if they want to catch up to the neurotechnology community which is asking for $1 billion over the next five years to spin up a new U.S. National Neurotechnology Initiative. That initiative is based on a remarkable claim, found in the legislation introduced earlier this year by Senators Murray and Domenici (here in PDF):

Nearly 100,000,000 Americans suffer from brain or nervous system disease, injury, or disorder . . .

That would be 1 in 3 Americans. Like I said, the climate scientists have a ways to go before their poor justifications for new funding sink to this level. Anyone who thinks that they have a more impressive example of a bad justification for increased science funding is invited to share in the comments!