**What** climate consensus, Oh Great Science Adviser?

Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about
freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each
and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”
- Vaclav Klaus, Blue Planet in Green Shackles

If you're wondering why on earth John Key is pushing ahead with his "world-leading" Emissions Tax Scam in the teeth of a recession and the face of widespread opposition—wondering perhaps just where in hell he’s getting his advice from—then wonder no more: it's because of increasingly shrill “advice” like this from his so-called science adviser, Peter Gluckman: that “the climate row” is “undermining “ confidence in science.

‘ There is a growing concern among those of us who have some role in marrying science and policy that the way the debate is being framed is undermining confidence in the science system,’ he told a Victoria University seminar series on key policy challenges facing New Zealand.”

Oh forfend us, oh Great Science Adviser from challenging figures that don’t stack up!

The Great Science Adviser  is a fine scientist  in his own field, but he is not a climate scientist.  Further, since his association with the Prime Minister—and his elevation to having a role in “marrying science and policy” (you can just hear the smug, self-satisfaction in that phrase, can’t you)—he appears to have eaten of the power-lust tree, peddling the mistaken idea that when government-appointed scientists talk, we should all just shut up and listen.

Scientific debate is undermining science, you say?  Well, forgive me Oh Great Science Adviser, but your political slip is showing. Whatever your scientific credentials, there is not and never can be a time or a means by which scientific debate can undermine science.  Scientific debate underpins science, it does not undermine it.  To not know that is, frankly, ignorant.

What does undermine science  is the shutting down of debate by claims of a non-existent scientific consensus, which is what Professor Gluckman explicitly relies on in his argument.  What does undermine science  is its politicisation, which is what Professor Gluckman specifically endorses, and enjoins.

And there is never a more important time in which to challenge the politicised science, and to demonstrate that there is no consensus whatsoever.

The science is settled?  Then why has the IPCC felt the need to manufacture evidence, and the government scientists on which it relies felt the need to massage data and alter temperature records? To have departed from science so severely “that they have become advocates for one particular set of hypotheses, and have become militant fighters against all others”?

The case is closed? Then why has a cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics just concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fails to stand up to scrutiny?

There is a scientific consensus? Then why has Britain’s Royal Society of scientists, of which I believe Professor Gluckman is a member, just released a statement saying quite explicitly that “any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect.”

No wonder so many many once celebrated climate researchers are now feeling like the used-car salesmen of the science world—and that Professor Gluckman feels called upon to step in and defend them.

But in defending these scientists, in endorsing the politicisation of science, he is doing irreparable damage to science itself—and in propping up John Key’s Emissions Tax Scam he is endorsing inflicting irreparable harm on New Zealand agriculture, and New Zealand business. 

Shame on him.

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