This SciDevNet editorial, The politics of science advice, by David Dickson demonstrates the muddled nature of current political posing about science.

The Bush administration has been accused of ignoring the scientific community on issues such as global warming, while the UK government's chief scientific advisor has been urged to exercise constraint in his comments on the issue. What's going on?

Dickson develops a thesis that science advisors should be careful to distinguish between science and their personal political opinions in public statements to avoid leaving the impression that their political opinions are science based or somehow credible due to their science association.

What upset the UK government, however — and raises deeper issues both about the formulation of 'science advice' and the way it is perceived and used — was not a directly scientific judgement by King. Rather it was his statement in his article in Science that "climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today — more serious even than the threat of terrorism".

As a personal assessment, it is one that King, like any member of a democratic society, is entitled to express. The dilemma it raises lies in the way that, coming from an individual whose professional responsibility is to offer advice that should appear to be impartial, it runs the risk of dressing up essentially subjective judgement (which King himself admitted) in a cloak of scientific credibility.

Quite right. The "cloak of scientific credibility" is frayed and tattered today precisely because of statements like those of King. But the problem is also that the scientific advice is poor even if given without the taint of political partiality. Consider the statement King made that caused the furor.

The speech picked up on themes that King had already expressed in an article in the journal Science, where he outlined the severity of the problems likely to be caused by global warming, and made the case for international action to prevent it, in particular by supporting the Kyoto protocol committing to targets for greenhouse-gas emissions. But he also pointed out that the United States was undermining these efforts by refusing to ratify the protocol – and seeking to justify its actions by making questionable claims about the legitimacy of the scientific arguments on which concern about global warming is based.

This is rubbish. The Kyoto protocol won't prevent climate change. The models on which the protocol are based show negligible effects from the proposed limits. It isn't just that King made a foolish analogy between climate change and terrorism, it is also that his science advice is laughably false. The Kyoto protocol isn't science based, it is purely political.

David Dickson, while seemingly developing a reasonable thesis that science advice should be distinguished from political views, uses the editorial to advance political views, dismissing the positions of the Bush administration as nothing but political ideology.

There should, of course, be little surprise about the Bush administration's position on such issues. On the one hand, any government committed to maximising the opportunities for free enterprise and minimising interference with the private sector will inevitably seek to get away with as little as it can in any sphere of regulation; environmental regulation is no exception. In addition, it is clear that the financial support provided by the oil industry to Bush and his allies in the Republican Party is being reflected in political stances that favour the industry's interests.

It is possible that Dickson is simply ignorant, truly unaware of the scientific debate about effective methods of environmental remediation, but if so it is a cultivated ignorance maintained for its political utility. This is the real issue in the politics of science advice. Scientists, science advisors and science writers who engage in public expression and advocacy seem remarkably ignorant about how societies function. They have a childish view, assuming that if they throw a tantrum that mommy can just fix whatever boo-boo is bothering them, and that when mommy fails to fix it she is just being mean.

This lack of socialization is a consequence of living lives sheltered from reality, never engaging with materiality and so learning the deep lessons of life. This is the truly interesting conflict between the politicized "scientists" that attack in the media and the US government. After decades of muddled policy divorced from material reality the US is proposing insightful policies that use the nature of material reality as an ally to achieve superior and durable environmental remediation. Critics are flumoxed since they have no idea how this works, have no grasp of society, economics or human behavior. They lack adult wisdom.

Those who care about the environment and have some maturity and wisdom are cautiously optimistic about this change in US policy. The proposed policies are theoretically superior since they enlist existing predispositions of society in the effort to improve - sort of environmental judo that uses the energy and momentum of polluters to improve for the benefits they will receive, and so tapping their creative energies to accelerate the process.

It seems ironic, poignantly contrary to what was expected, that the policies of the current US administration may be environmentally superior to those of competing political groups that claim environmental concern as a core principle. Those out of power groups may be sincerely distressed by environmental change (though in many cases this is just a convenient pose), but they don't have good ideas about how to improve the situation. They are crippled by their authoritarian world view, their distrust and dislike of humans and their institutions, and their anti-humanist aesthetics. The Greens are not green, they are grey. They are humorless, dull, anhedonic emotional cripples devoid of the social adeptness needed to contribute useful input to society.

Let us have the wisdom to distinguish the message from the messenger, the lesson from the teacher. Whether we approve of the overall political stance of the current administration or not we would do well to consider their environmental polices carefully. Kyoto is a stupid policy that would yield no benefits while incurring significant costs. We need to steal a page from the Unanimous Fallacies post that warned of the dangers of the “Concorde fallacy” and disinclination to heed negative feedback for fear of disrupting unanimity.