How an Alzheimer’s ‘cabal’ thwarted progress toward a cure

Exactly through the same mechanism that skewed Alzheimer's research. Some topics are "hotter" and scientists know that to obtain grants, be published, and attract unspecialised media attention they better mention climate change in their articles and possibly highlight some major consequence (even with qualifiers as "may", "could" etc.).

This stuff is then picked up by mainstream media and spread to a much larger public, making the topic even hotter. Finally, scientists are a subset of the mainstream media consumers, and might not be much better than the average public outside their domain of expertise. So they are likely to be influenced by sensationalistic reporting outside their field. (For example, a physicist cannot evaluate the soundness of an economic study on the consequences of climate change- but might be influenced by it when deciding grants or publication worthiness of something related to his field).

> Most of the foundational research was done long before climate change was being discussed in the media.

The foundational research is tiny compared to the mass of research on the myriad consequences of climate change. And the effects are what concern us.

> Fox News, a nakedly partisan cable network that adamantly denies the existence of climate change

Yes, Fox News. I am European, I have never watched a single minute of Fox News. I can assure you that almost all news outlets I follow just love to publish news about climate change, the scarier the better. The situation of the US might be different- on the other hand last time I checked 40% of Americans believed in creationism, so maybe the US public opinion and media are not a good sample.

Just to clarify, it's both infections OR dysbiosis (your own commensal bacteria, fungi and virus going out of control).

The infection + molecular mimicry theory of autoimmunity was already quite well established in the 80s, but commensal dysbiosis + molecular mimicry is only starting to emerge now, and it's likely to be even more important. See section 1 (introduction) of this paper for a whole overview:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2019.12.18.881433v1....

What you said is very intuitive however not entirely true. Let me explain: Bacteria are happy no matter what as they (as community of different bacteria) can adjust to content of the human gut; i.e. when we feed simple sugars (in contrast to fibre that is a polymer made of many sugars) some microorganisms will be more than happy to go on simple sugar-diet that requires less energy to consume it. However it can disregulate metabolic network of microbiome that has been co evolving with fibre based diet rather than simple sugars. Early humans consumed much more plant based fibre and therefore we hardwired our human metabolism and twicked immune response to co exist with microbiome that consumes fibre. Let me give you an example: when microbiome gets fibre from our diet it returns us side products of fibre metabolism including short chain fatty acids (scfa). They(scfa) stimulate many receptors in our body and keep us healthy. So in summary: microbiome will adjust its metabolism to what is available and will be always happy given there is any food. Microbes can even consume our own mucosa when we starve or when we die. It is more about keeping the community of microbes at homeostasis (in contrast to dysbiosis). Keeping them on diet that we used to feed them for hundreds of thousands years of our co evolution even preceding primates appearance. Our bodies depend on side products of microbial metabolism of what we used to feed them and definitely not of what western like diet feeds them nowodays. We live in the world of disregulated microbial metabolism. It disregulates us, our own metabolism, our brains, our immune responses, almost all tissues. We cause dysbiosis of the global ecosystems on the planet. This is reflected in the dysbiosis of our own gut. We are degenerating our microbial shield and degenerate our and other species.

Ahh, yes. A link to a 10 year old climategate article. Nice one.

> everyone wants their research to be sexy

This is flat out wrong. There are plenty of people who care more about money, prestige, and power than they do about producing sexy research. Right now, the easiest path to achieve that would be to produce contrarian research. There is no shortage of funding from the oil industry, and the right wing media will give air time to anyone that sounds like they have a plausible sounding argument.

> you seem to have a very restrictive idea of climate change science

I am well aware that there is a large amount of uncertainty regarding the predictions of the future. Pretty much everyone, including the 'academia establishment' acknowledges that. If anything, that fact that they are so open about these uncertainties makes your argument of 'cabal-group-think' weaker.