> has rapidly begun to attract PHD students and others because of the vast amounts of grant money devoted to it in recent years

I think you are very likely wrong about the causal link there: the way science organizations allocate money is that they decide what is important to study, so it should make sense that important fields are the ones that attract money and people. And there's a general scientific sense in which some fields are more important to the progress of science than others. But that's just how it should be, and less important fields should have less money. So you observe the expected behaviour (important fields get more research effort), but you think you're seeing a pathological behaviour instead. After all, what evidence would you accept that climate science deserves that particular level of funding?