Leigh Stearns thought she’d hit the jackpot when the Heising-Simons Foundation awarded her research team $6 million to study a collapsing glacier in Greenland. She had concerns about accepting private funding, which offered less transparency and less accountability to the public compared to federal money, she said. But government funding was scarce, and she sorely needed it for her work on the glacier, important for understanding sea level rise. Then she saw the news this week that Jeff Bezos intends to give $10 billion to scientists, non-governmental organizations and activists working on climate change. The possibilities presented by that money were mind-boggling, the glaciologist said. But she also wondered about the implications of one person funding […]