Anyone with a science degree & a govt. grant can come up with a theory about global weather patterns.
For a time in my past I was responsible for some R&D in a large company. To stretch the dollars and help with good will, recruiting and stuff like that I farmed out some of the work to academia. From that I got a real look at the publish or perish world and sucking in grants to administer. All engineering money was supposed to come in through the grants management office that promptly took at least 60% of the money for the general fund and administration. It was one giant self-licking ice cream cone. The grant office even went so far as to tell me that I couldn't direct the work I was paying for.
I figured out a way to get some of the money into direct support to the college of engineering. Oh boy! Did that set the grants gang back on their heels! I just laughed, there wasn't a thing they could do about it. We even went so far as to recruit specific graduate students from around the country to do some of the work. One part of the secret sauce to success was the department head of one of the groups I worked with was a former R&D manager of a similar large company.