Quote of the Day
The Nobel laureate Professor Brian Schmidt, announced today as the Australian of the Year, on science and politics:
Science should inform policy, but must not become politicised, he says. “On issues like climate change, coal-seam gas, water management in the Murray-Darling Basin and stem cells we have seen science and public policy get mixed together,” he said. “We have seen policymakers challenging science, which they are ill-equipped to do. It is important for scientists not to get involved in the policy debate because if we do that then we are tainting the scientific argument.” (source)
Schmidt’s has previously defended the AGW consensus (see here), and his comment about policymakers not challenging science would be more credible if the scientists in question possessed proper standards of scientific integrity.
Unfortunately, in climate science consensus circles, political and financial motivations have usurped impartial free-thinking research, so that inconvenient data and results, rather than being welcomed as illuminating a path to greater understanding, are suppressed, hidden and explained away in order to avoid clouding the “message”, or should I say “The Cause” (© Climategate II).
By the way, there should be no such thing as “a cause”, in the sense of a belief or conviction, in science. Such a concept belongs firmly in the realm of propaganda and politics.
Australian Climate Madness 
“We have seen policymakers challenging science, which they are ill-equipped to do.”
This is the bit I really object to.
It takes a well qualified scientist to propose a theory but ANYBODY with basic comprehension skills is in a position to question a scientific theory if the see flaw. You do not have to be a rocket surgeon to notice that predictions of snow-free winters or rain-free Queenslands have failed.
You do not need a degree in climatology to realise that a weather station parked behind a jet airline runway is going to produce rubbish data.
You do not need a Nobel Prize to understand that computer models which import garbage also export garbage.
There’s nothing wrong with policymakers challenging science; they should just have a good argument, like anyone should.
I agree wholeheartedly however, that scientists should stay out of policy debate.
it is only when they have the oportunity to speak about society that we realise the very very narrow field of knowledge and their limits in wisdom
Congratulations to Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt for encouraging his academic colleagues to “not to get involved in the policy debate because if we do that then we are tainting the scientific argument.”
If only he had given his advice to fellow ANU Professor Will Steffen and numerous staff members of ANU’s Climate Change Institute and its Fenner School of Environment and Society before May 2010.
In that month these people collaborated with Dr Simon Niemeyer, Research Fellow in ANU’s College of Arts and Social Sciences in “A Pilot Program for the Citizen’s Assembly on Climate Change” conducted at the ANU campus.
This “Pilot Study” was a blatant mis-use of social science to establish whether ordinary Australians would kowtow to propaganda techniques and swallow mis-information within a controlled mass group environment to accept the IPCC concoction that anthropogenic climate change is real. Professor Steffen and his entourage of ANU scientists failed to provide verifiable evidence and refused to answer questions from all but one member of each small group at the end of each session in a contrivance sourced from a corruption of the Delphi Technique.
Professor Schmidt needs to check the validity of this comment by conferring with Prof Steffen and Dr Niemeyer. He ought then issue another public statement based on the real intent of this so-called Pilot Study. Their conscious and planned contrivance and determination to sway everyday Australians to the corruption of climate science warrants a chapter in a full Royal Commission into this massive fraud.