Flagrant and cynical office

From time to time I have reported on climate activism among UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials. There was, for example, the Washington diplomat's decision to spend his time (and public funds) on supporting Democrats in the US Senate. Or the official who used public funds to make climate change awareness films in Africa. Today there is new evidence that activists within the civil service are spending your money to advance their own political views. This comes in the shape of an official email circulated by an official in the Beijing embassy which sought to counter David Rose's recent Mail on Sunday article about recent temperature history.

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Future directions for scientific advice in Whitehall

Here are some diary dates for those in the Cambridge area:

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)

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No jam tomorrow

Yet more madness from the bureaucrats in Europe...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/10/07/now-the-european-union-starts-to-ban-recycling/

Crime, and punishment?

Nick Cohen reviews a recent series of scandals in the literary world, and contrasts the different results in the UK and the USA.

The editor of the New York Times fired Jayson Blair in 2003 for inventing stories and stealing the work of others. No other publisher would touch him and he is now something called a "life coach" in Virginia. The New Republic fired Stephen Glass in 1998 for making up stories for its venerable pages. He left journalism to study the law. Alas, the New York State Bar deemed him "morally unfit" to practise even as a lawyer – a barb that must have stung – and he ended up performing with a Los Angeles comedy troupe.

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Mandarins flout the law

It seems that while Tony Blair was in power, a secret email system was put in place in Downing Street so as to avoid FOI laws. All manner of other breaches of FOI laws were also everyday occurrences.

Information commissioner Christopher Graham claimed secret documents were being destroyed and Whitehall officials were using private email addresses to evade scrutiny.

This is not much of a surprise to BH readers. It is also a commonplace here that the situation will not change until the law is amended to allow prosecutions of these breaches of the law - until the statute of limitations is extended the mandarins will continue to flout the law and to thumb their noses at the electorate.

More indium

A few weeks back I looked at a BBC article which raised the spectre of a worldwide shortage of indium, a rare element much in demand for LCD screens. Despite the BBC's alarm, it appeared that people in the industry were in fact quite sanguine about their ability to meet rising demand.

Roger Harrabin has now picked up the baton in this area, discussing a Green Alliance paper that seeks to encourage recycling and considers metal supply as part of this. As Harrabin explains, according to the paper there is a problem with indium.

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More entrepreneurs

A few months ago, I told the story of how the EU's biofuels policy was put in place through the activities of a "policy entrepreneur" - a senior bureaucrat with producer interests at heart.

Today, the Register carries the story of how UK bureaucrats in the Intellectual Property Office seem to be up to something similar, trying to rework IP law in favour of the Googles of this world.

We also heard evidence of bureaucrats taking an activist role, possibly misleading their ministers.

“Some evidence was not fed through to ministers,” said Andrew Yeates of the Educational Recording Agency.

And the consultation also heard that IPO bureaucrats had been attempting to change international policy before proposals had been discussed, let alone decided, in the UK. This state-within-a-state had its own very active Foreign Office, it seems.

GCSA candidates

Mandarins have narrowed down the applicants for the role of Government Chief Scientific Adviser to a shortlist of six (story here).

A few of the names are familiar to me. Richard Friend was one of those considered for the Oxburgh panel and indeed was one of those who was thought to be likely to look at the investigation with "questioning objectivity". No doubt this mindset will be viewed dimly in Whitehall.

Adrian Smith has worked alongside Beddington for some years, and offered his services for the Climategate investigations. Walport and Anderson also look like insider candidates. The other two - Fleming and Frank Kelly - are unknown quantities.

Another CSA moves on

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Sir John Beddington is stepping down as government chief scientific adviser comes the news that Bob Watson is to depart from the CSA role at DEFRA.

His replacement is Professor Ian Boyd, who researches mammals at St Andrews and appears to be, well, a scientist rather than an activist.

This looks like some welcome depoliticisation of the top echelons of the scientific civil service to me.

Corrupt inquiries

Readers here have come across one two university cover-ups in the last few years, so the news reported at Climate Audit that the President of Penn State university has been fired for failing to investigate allegations of paedophilia against one of football coaches is perhaps less of a surprise than it might be to others. For these latest allegations to be centred on Penn State - Michael Mann's place of work, and the university responsible for one of the Climategate non-inquiries adds a certain piquancy to the story.

As McIntyre points out, the impetus do this seems to have been to protect the university's commercial interests. One can only assume that the university bigwigs were incentivised to maintain and grow the flow of funds into the football programme.

When we turn to the university of East Anglia then, we might wonder if we can see a similar commercial incentive in place. I think we probably can - it is known that CRU was bringing in very large sums of money from US funding bodies for doing very little at all. The need to protect that flow of funds may well have been enough for the integrity of the inquiries to be jettisoned from the start.

Can we conclude from this that the universities are not working for the public benefit?

(H/T Dead Dog Bounce)

Beddington hearing

Sir John Beddington is about to be grilled by the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on the role of chief scientific advisers.

The video will be here from 11:30am UK time.

Medics do climate

Fiona Godlee, the editor of the British Medical Journal, has penned an editorial that reads, if not as the longest suicide note in history, then at least as a suicide note written by someone with a bit more time on their hands than they need to get the job done.

The editorial was prompted by a recent BMJ conference about the "Health and Security Perspectives of Climate Change", and this is what Ms Godlee has to say about it.

The greatest risk to human health is neither communicable nor non-communicable disease, it is climate change. Saying this, as I and others have started doing at conferences, seems to take a certain courage. We’ve been emboldened by clear statements from WHO’s director general Margaret Chan and from the Lancet (www.thelancet.com/climate-change). But this week, at a meeting hosted by the BMJ in collaboration with an extraordinary alliance of organisations (http://climatechange.bmj.com, doi:10.1136/bmj.d6775), it became clear that we are going to have to get braver still.

Apparently people trust doctors and soldiers more than other professionals. It's hard to imagine that respect lasting much longer when the money the public puts into healthcare and defence ends up paying for this kind of thing.

Update on Oct 19, 2011 by Bishop Hill

I'm struck by Chris Rapley's reported that "the science is overwhelming and settled."

I thought real scientists didn't say that.

Update on Oct 19, 2011 by Bishop Hill

By a wonderful coincidence, Maurizio Morabito is livetweeting Rapley's lecture from the Institute of Physics tonight. He seems to be giving a rather different account of what we know about climate change to informed listeners.

Scientific independence

Updated on Aug 19, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Matthu in Unthreaded notes a video of a retired CSIRO scientist named Art Raiche speaking about scientists' ability (or inability) to pursue their research independently of government:

The original Scientists of the CSIRO were the best of their day and the CSIRO was a non-government organisation working with quality science and how useful it was to Australia. (research)

In the 80s, I noticed we were under increasing pressure to become more “business-like” and the doors were opened to “management consultation.”

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Scientific advisers are lobbyists

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 minster, for to have him gagged.

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Why is Beddington against thorium

GWPF have an interesting article about a promising new nuclear power technology - thorium reactors. Perhaps most intriguing is Sir John Beddington's opposition to their development:

...although the Coalition Government continues to pour subsidies worth many millions of pounds into wind power, which, as Live revealed earlier this year, produces at best intermittent energy with potential environmental costs, it has so far decided to do nothing about thorium except to maintain a ‘watching brief’. 

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