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One of their main arguments is that there is an industry based on climate control and research and there are economic forces trying to make people believe in global warming because of their vested interest.

This seems reasonable. ...until you realize that 9 of the top 10 fortune 500 companies and a far greater number of lobbyists have a vested interest in denying global warming.

The $2trillion/year motor/oil industry makes the few billion invested in climate watch and control look like chump change.

Actually the more I consider it the more ridiculous that video seems.

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Another problem with this argument is that general scientific opinion is so one sided that you'd have to believe in a major conspiracy theory.

Researchers at major universities don't need to make up horror stories to secure funding, they'll get it anyway. It's not like climate and weather are marginal fields without obvious practical application.

I realize that being able to put a scare spin on a subject certyinly helps an individual researcher's grant application but this is just as true of other fields as well.

If there's a natural tendency for research in general to focus on artificial doomsday scenarios because of vested interests in maintinaing or increasing funding then we should see this happening in many fields. But having a massively one-sided scientific consensus on a supposedly debatable topic (never mind the claims by some deniers that climate change is a total non-issue) never happens. At least I can't think of a single example.

If these deniers want to claim a funding bias to explain the consensus they need to do a lot more than simply say that it's theoretically possible. They need to at least explain why it's happening in the climate research community but not in other fields.