Bishop Hill Future directions for scientific advice in Whitehall
Oct 26, 2012 Bureaucrats Here are some diary dates:
This series of seminars will look at ways in which government can make more effective use of scientists and scientific advice in the context of Civil Service reform and a move towards open policy making.
It will build towards the publication of a report and a final conference in April 2013, at which keynote speakers will include Sir Mark Walport (incoming Government Chief Scientific Adviser) and Sir Bob Kerslake (Head of the Civil Service)
Scientific advice has never been in greater demand; nor has it been more contested. From climate change to cyber-security, poverty to pandemics, food technologies to fracking, the questions being asked of experts by policy makers, the media and the public continue to multiply. At the same time, in the wake of the global financial crisis and controversies such as ‘Climategate’, the same experts are under greater scrutiny.
A series of seminars looking at ways in which government can make more effective use of scientists and scientific advice to improve policymaking will begin on 20 November at the Institute for Government. The purpose of these seminars is to stimulate fresh thinking and practical recommendations on future directions in scientific advice in Whitehall, and will lead to the publication of a report and a final conference in April 2013.
The project is a shared initiative of five partners: The Institute for Government (IfG); The Alliance for Useful Evidence; The University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP); SPRU and the ESRC STEPS Centre at Sussex University; and Sciencewise- ERC.
For more information on each of the seminars, and to register to attend, please follow the links below.
Seminar 1: Culture clash – bridging the divide between science and policy
20 November 2012 (18:00 - 19:30 followed by drinks). Hosted by the Institute for Government at IfG.Seminar 2: Broadening the evidence base: science and social science in social policy
8 January 2013 (12:00 - 14:00 including lunch). Hosted by The Alliance of Useful Evidence at Nesta.Seminar 3: Experts, publics and open policy
15 January 2013 (16:00 - 18:00 including networking). Hosted by Sciencewise-ERC at the House of Lords.Seminar 4: Credibility across cultures: the international politics of scientific advice
6 & 7 Feburary 2013 (starting with dinner on 6 February). Hosted by the STEPS Centre and SPRU at the University of Sussex.
Reader Comments (16)
Under Blair, Science became a servant of Policy. Researchers were told relevance would be valued highly in grant applications so any project confirming 'climate change', aka more political control and higher taxation, would trump scientific relevance.
Thus we have an army of supplicant 'scientists' involved in phony research, transformation of real science to institutional brown-nosing. Yet reality is looming. As the World cools, Winter is hitting the North very early, as it did the South: http://climaterealists.com/?id=10463
Reduction of average low level Italian temperatures by 15 °C compared with normal will be a shock to them, as will snow and ice over large parts of the UK. I suspect UK government is desperately trying to de-programme the civil service. By 2020 we'll need icebreakers to keep Northern ports open in winter!
Sadly for me none are in the Cambridge area.
A failure to check data?
[snip] I'm afraid that I share Alec's relish at the prospect of Global Cooling. The sunspot cycle is a month or two from peak, which promises the most feeble cycle since Edwardian times. Reasoning as follows: (a) The peak corresponds to a crossover of the Solar Magnetic Field from S to N - http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Polar-Fields-1966-now.png (b) 140 years of sunspot records in the beautiful Butterfly Diagram - http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/bfly.gif and (c) The Svensmark hypothesis linking solar activity to cosmic ray penetration of Earth's atmosphere, governing albedo.
[snip]
Institute for Government? Please, somebody explain! Why do we need one? Also, when has Science had absolutely anything to do with Social Science, two completely different subjects, one, a real subject entrenched in the search for knowledge, the second, a wishy washy subject that may or may not have any relevance in society, entrenched in studying the control of society by political measures based on ideology. One of these ranks alongside that other doyen of modern society & establishment, that of studying for a degree in Political Science, whatever that is when it's at home. I'll let others decide which is which! :-)
Brent
"sea ice in Portsmouth harbour"
Don't you know that AGW is unfalsifiable?
Actually, I think Truro harbour is closer to Zed, but no doubt if it freezes, it will just be the weather...
"Institute for Government"
That sounds suspiciously like Sir Humphrey's Department of Administrative Affairs. It must be so difficult to write satire these days!
There is actually an interesting parallel between the corruption of science and the previous corruption of art.
Historically the only way a painter or sculptor could make a living was to make art that people wanted to buy. Sometimes the artist might obtain patronage from the Church or a monarch, but most painters didn't have such patrons. Even then, while the Church might be your patron, the Church didn't exist simply to decide on what was good art and bad art - it was a consumer like any other buyer of art.
Scroll forward to the last 50 years or so, and you find that the decline of figurative art in the west has coincided almost exactly with the rise of the institutional state patron. Thus you get Nicholas Serota deciding what is and isn't art on our behalf and using public money to buy Tracey Emin's unmade bed and other such shite.
What has happened to art is that private taste has been nationalised and replaced with the state's taste, in reality that of a handful of individuals. There are a few rich private players who buy this crap too, but first of all everyone involved has a vested interest in the price of art always going up (because npobody loses) making it quite safe, and second, there is a form of reserve bank of art behind them in the shape of the state, whose buying power of last resort props the market up and makes it less risky to speculate in it.
Few outside Nicholas Serota's clique would disagree that art has got worse over the last decades and it has done so for the same reason science has: because it's state funded and to get funded you need to serve the state's agenda.
I was not the first to notice that, if a subject has the word "science" in its title, it is probably not science.
Brent: agreed about the solar cycle. The key question is whether it will be a Maunder or a Dalton minimum. I suspect more towards the former plus the cooling ENSO making V. cold. Now there may be some GHG-AGW to compensate for the solar-induced temperature fall but I suspect it is small to vanishing. The task of government is therefore to re-educate policy makers from predicting drought and heat to wet and perhaps very cold.
I live in Cambridge.
I'll try and pay a visit to one or more of these events.
James p
No port in Truro but here in Perranporth where I currently am it's brass monkey weather, cold wind, cloudy and showers. Did someone mention an Indian summer, huh!
Bitter experience suggests that the Government (and the next. And the one after that) will continue to appoint activists rather than scientists to these roles. Just like every PM at least since Thatcher (it certainly didn't start with Blair, Alec!)
So what are we to make of this series of "Seminars"?
What do we know of the instigators and the "Partners"?
I'm not exactly enthused by the names of their organisations.
Do attendees have to bring their own whitewash or is it supplied?
Lord B
I wasn't sure about Truro's maritime heritage, either, but this does seem to confirm it. [snip]
Link
Martin: Maggie fell for the CO2-AGW scam because she wanted to remove power from the coal miners. However, she had a Damascene conversion later on.
Martin: I was part time in academia when the 'relevance' aspect was put into grant applications under Blair.
AlecM
And I was in technical management in British Coal at the time of the strike - during which (by agreement between Management Unions and the NUM), I was working to keep the mines safe such that they could be re-opened and worked when the dispute was over, whatever the outcome.
I well remember at the beginning of the strike when colleagues expressed the hope that, "once Maggie had sorted out Arthur and the AGM" (which, of course was where there was some vestige of the "power" to which you refer - certainly not the miners themselves) "She will take care of us".
Well yes, she certainly did that, but not in the way that my peers hoped!
Yes, she does eventually seem to have had second thoughts about the Frankenstein's Monster she had created with the cAGW scam. Just as she did with the European Union.
Unfortunately, by the time she saw the light on the way to Damascus, it was too bloody late!