What a remarkably stunning degree of ignorance, and also an exact match for the message which is hammered home in the various media.
You seem utterly unaware of how grants fund a great deal of academic research (and the funding in the field of 'climate science' is enormous.) You also seem unaware that many professors make a good bit of their income (a majority in some cases) providing services such as being expert witnesses. This is the case with one of my relatives. There is nothing wrong with that, but there could be in some circumstances absent proper procedures including transparency.
Again, I am just going to address your opening and I am going to assume that the rest of what you say is built up on the same faulty logic.
Okay, so first, just to be clear earlier when I said "my friend gets $10,000 per article" what I really meant is.... it is me. I am a professor, so you don't need to school me on how the game works. I have been in it for a long time.
Despite your delusion that the whole of academia has been bought out and all are corrupt, let me try to explain to you again how it works.
Yes, you are right there is lots of money that goes into climate science, but it will only go to the top 2-3% of researchers at the top universities. Nobody is giving big grants for your average state school or lower. Big grants usually only go to the big schools with big names. And no matter how much money you think there is, there isn't that much going into it. And next, after that money is given to the profs it isn't conditional. Once the profs get it, its theirs. They can publish any finding they want regardless of who gave them the money. It isn't like the grants come under the stipulation that their findings have to meet the donor's vision or else the researcher has to pay it back. Almost all of the profs getting big grants also have tenure. They don't really care what result their donor wanted.
In climate science at least, and probably many other politically useful fields, you don't get the grant in the first place unless there is a pretty good indication that you'll come out with the correct results. Sure, some profs might screw up and do real science, but typical when they were on the edge of retiring and wish to live out their golden years with some modicum of self-respect. You did read the East Anglia CRU e-mails by now (not to mention their source code), right?
By rights everything the IPCC has ever touched should be thrown out the window and re-done as well as everything which was based in some part on it. That is the pernicious effects of junk science. That is not what is happening. The whole charade is papered over as well as possible. And that has gone as well as can be expected. The scientists I've talked to have a vague notion that it was no big deal based on some 2nd or 3rd level description they read somewhere. None of them actually looked at the leaked material.
And yes some professor's make a good bit being witnesses, like about 0.5%. The ones that do, can get paid quite well. The other 99.5% get no gigs. It is much like being a musician. When you make it big, you are set, but the rest stick to their day jobs.
The best way to make money outside of the university is a way you didn't mention. The most common way to earn substantial cash is to become a consultant for private industry. While I don't have any close relationships with anybody that made it to the rockstar level in academia of professional high paid witness, I do know quite a few that have gotten rich being consultants. And of course we know that the private industry in the global warming debate that would hire said profs are the oil and gas companies. They have very deep pockets to hire consultants. Yet only 3% of profs are global warming deniers.
No academics ever follow the revolving door into the eco-industrial complex of course.
Social 'scientists' have been the true trailblazers of the new paradigm for some time. That is, pick an end-goal (lets say 'social justice') then work toward it at all costs. That's why they have always been something of a joke. Of course most real scientists and engineers are to polite to point out the obvious, but everyone knows the deal. Now that the strategy is rubbing off into real science it is becoming a genuine threat.
Your narrative sucks.
You remind me of Fox News. Lie as much as you can and then accuse the other side of lying. Stall as much as you can and then accuse the other side of stalling.
FWIW, I'm a hard-core left winger though I've always had certain views which differ from the party line (such as 2nd amendment stuff.) I've always despised Fox News, but I must admit that I do less so as of late since they do bring on those with an opposing view from time to time.
As recently as the middle of this thread I was much more on the 'warmist' side. You could see in my initial post here some time ago that I posited that corporate influence might have some effect on the science, and that whatever the case, the same old spam from the 'denier' side could get tedious and justify the ban. What I did NOT do was to really take a side simply because I had not gotten around to studying the issue. Since then I have, and the hypothesis that 'climate change' is part of a larger program of theft by a certain class of powerful people has remarkable explanatory power across a broad range of observations.
Most of my friends, family, and co-workers are greenies, and some of them fairly hard-core about it. I know they are neither bad nor stupid people. I think they've just been had. Even the DEQ bitch who has been hassling me (until my attorney told her to cease communications with me and go through him) probably has no concept of what she is doing and who she is doing it for. She's just a cog in the wheel. She gets to play petty tyrant and feed business to her local industry friends, and that's the dynamics which keep the game accelerating. That is I believe very much by design, and the design is very clever and effective indeed.