Do climate scientists have incentives to make catastrophic predictions?

It would not be worthwhile. I suppose hack might pose as a real climate  scientist and write some sensationalist book or article for the popular press to  make a few bucks, but it would quickly be discredited when the prediction did  not come true. In fact, he would not need to wait for the prediction to not come  true. The scientific community would denounce the report very quickly, and the  report would not be published in a serious peer reviewed journal. A real climate  scientist would be throwing away their career and credibility for life in  exchange for some flash in the pan publicity and a few dollars in royalties if  they did that. In contrast, a climate scientist that understates his findings  seldom suffers for it directly. If they make a modest prediction in the midway  range of probabilities, their prediction will not be far off ether way. This is  why climate scientists always err on the side of caution and make very  conservative predictions that are full of statements like "there is a 90%  probability that" or "there is a high degree of uncertainty." The people who  stand to make the big bucks making false predictions are the ones who get paid  by the fossil fuel companies to report that global warming is not true. They can  go for many years writing reports and making predictions that do not come true,  since their job is to create confusion. Read "Merchants of Doubt" (or see the  movie).

The claims that climate alarmists are protecting their research funding are absurd. Climate change research is hard work, with huge compute runs on HPC systems that are immensely frustrating to manage, and which go wrong from the usual software gremlins, and require exhaustive checking and cross-checking, in themselves and against other models. You have to be a dedicated believer in the importance of the work to do all this. You would not choose climate change research if you were looking to milk research funds, you would pick something much easier. As for other climate change research - jaunts to Greenland, Antarctica to drill ice cores, to mountain lakes to drill mud cores - ocean trips to measure salinity, temperature etc - still all hard work. Maybe you could pick on coral reef work as pretty fun. Climate research is not trendy and "milking funds", it's quite unfashionable and a hard path to take, as you know your work will probably be ignored.

No, no and no.The idea that the 'hoax' argument has a crux is silly.The argument itself is silly.Ask yourself what is more likely; 1. that tens (hundreds) of thousands of people, including bankers, insurance guys, politicos, scientists, environmentalists and so on, have conspired to falsify data in some way in order to convince us that there is a problem, and that these people have a reason for wanting us to think that there's a problem, and that nobody has noticed?2. The same tens of thousands have been fooled by a cunning and devious few and no-one has enough intelligence to see through this 'hoax', even though these are supposed to be the smartest on the planet?3. There is no 'hoax'.If your believe 1. or two, then who is in charge, who is responsible, and what are their motivations? If your believe 3., and there is a change happening and we are responsible collectively and it could become an existential problem if unchecked, the motive for saying so is fairly obvious.Ditch the 'hoax' hokum; it's so irrational that discussing the validity of any of the arguments is utterly pointless.

Yes. - The United States alone has spent 79 billion in funding for AGW, including research, foreign aid, propaganda, environmental groups, etc. - The worldwide carbon market, based on climate scientists' research that carbon must be regulated, stands valued at 126 billion, with it projected to reach between 2-10 trillion dollars. - Compare this with 26 million, the amount Exxon paid to fund skeptical climate scientist. And yes, that says million, not billion. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html So who gets part of that 79 billion? Any university doing research on climate change. But in order for the government to continue researching the threat and solutions of climate change, they must continue to think that there is a threat. Why does the government have interest in funding climate change? The carbon market, projected to reach into the trillions, all under government control; need I say more? So yes, a lot of people stand to make a lot of money from climate change. If suddenly, scientists admit there really is no danger, we exaggerated, then  people will lose billions possibly trillions from the collapse of Green industry. This is especially a danger for the UK where a lot of people have their pensions tied up in the green industry. Therefore, climate scientists must continue to make ever increasingly dreadful and disastrous predictions in order to keep the machine running. Here's a little more http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/11/obama-spending-increase-global-warming-research/ * * Yes it's Fox News, however, there are many quotes from scientists about this issue so at least read what they have to say.