Have you ever tried applying for research grants?
I had a look at the process with my provincial government a few months ago, and there are boxes of key terms which you can check. If your research deals with key terms in these areas, you're more likely to get funding. One of the boxes was for women and gender studies, and there was a box for climate change research too. These are two of the topics which get some of the highest funding, no surprise then that now climate change is also a feminist topic.
People don't set out to do a project which makes or breaks massive theories like AGW, they research specific topics and collect data in specific areas. But convincing the government to keep funding such research means convincing them that this is a matter which the government both needs to take seriously because it may be responsible, and needs to take action which can work. The grant process is, in fact, highly political, and each project provides parliament with brief lay-terms summaries.
If studying climate were just business as usual from day to day, like, say, recording migratory patterns, then it'll probably still get funding, but those numbers are not likely to make you a millionaire like this fellow:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... abuse.html and this fellow
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/18/d ... de-income/
Not to mention the book deals and movie sales from the hype. Then there's of course the fact that before the hype the stocks of renewable energy sources and electric car companies was relatively equal to its value, compared to the height of the hype a few years ago, when they would have made any investor a small fortune. Of course, I do support renewable energy, but that's beyond the point. If you are just investing in oil stocks, you know you won't be making much more than they're currently worth.
There are many incentives to promoting the idea of AGW. Even accepting all the AGW premises, you still have uncertainty due to the unpredictability of the system -- let's face it, there has been, and probably never will be, reliable ways of predicting climate change. Some people won't be convinced that the premises of AGW don't hold up to scrutiny until we really do have too little carbon based energy sources to utilise and they still see CO2 levels rising and falling with no help from us.
In the end, remember that this is almost all government led. The millions made by Hansen are mostly from government funded institutions, prizes and grants. People in government benefit with jobs and money, that's the bottom line. So long as government as it currently works exists, bureaucracy will keep increasing, and they'll keep paying themselves more and more because they have the monopoly on violence through taxation. Is there a solution to this problem? Not immediately, no. But vox populi vox dei. It doesn't matter what the real state of science is, it doesn't matter that there isn't a real consensus in institutions of higher learning, what works, works according to the simple equation of: public opinion + potential bureaucratic profit = public policy.