[joe_mamba]

> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.

That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.

[godelski]

I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.

To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic