One of the apocalypsers we follow on a regular basis here at BH is Sir David King, the former government chief scientist. He's in the news again today, pressuring David Cameron into action on climate:
David Cameron must end his silence on climate change and "step up to the plate" to provide international leadership, the former government chief scientific adviser Prof Sir David King says on Wednesday.
Writing in the Guardian, King also reveals that after his declaration that global warming was a greater threat than global terrorism in 2004, then US president, George Bush, asked Tony Blair, then prime minister, for to have him gagged.
We know that David King is a man who has an idiosyncratic approach to factual accuracy, so in the absence of any supporting evidence I think I will take that last part with a pinch of salt. But the wider question that King's 2004 remarks raise is at what point a scientific advisor just becomes a paid lobbyist. Advisors are traditionally imagined as quietly telling people in power what's what - they are the leader's way of tapping into a network of expertise and specialised knowledge. Their work is done discreetly, unseen by the general public. But someone who makes noisy public demands for political action and tries to press political leaders into a particular course of action is not an adviser, but a lobbyist. Now of course, King is now performing his lobbying from a position in a university rather than from within the government machine, but I'm not sure that this makes much of a difference.
This is why I am so interested in Sir John Beddington's peregrinations around the world, in which he speechifies on one scientific hobgoblin or another. This looks much more like publicly funded political activism than scientific advice, and, that being the case, is no more acceptable than the public funding of trade union officials that has been exercising the minds of the Westminster village in recent months.