In the typical representation of justice Themis holds the scales but is blinded signifying that justice is blind to the status of those who are to be judged. Justice is blind to differences of race, to sex, but also to whether a person is head of the Royal Society or some blogger, whether public sector or private, whether an academic or a consultant. Justice requires that we are all judged equally by the same law.
If you offer advice to government and claim that advice should be followed, then you are taking on the role of a normal private sector consultant who is legally liable for the costs incurred by those to whom they give bad advice.
This is just a simple principle of law. Another is that there is no distinction between an academic and any any other person – we are all equal under the law.
The private sector consultant’s advice can be relied on, not because they are superior, but because from bitter experience in the courts, they know they are liable when their advice is wrong. That is why they are cautious – a lesson academics have not so far learnt.
Academics used to avoid giving advice and so stayed clear of this legal minefield. Then they became arrogant and thought they were omniscient and could divine the future of climate.
But when academics chose themselves to step into the role of the advisor, and despite all we sceptics said, refused to heed our advice to be cautious, they wilfully took on the full legal liability when their advice is wrong.
They chose it!
Now academics will, and must, suffer the financial penalty for this bad advice. Because legally there is no distinction between them and the private sector.
You can’t have one law for one group giving advice and another for another – or if you did, the one with no liability would have no incentive to be accurate, whilst those we the legal penalty and incentive to be accurate would have no commercial interest. Because why work in a field when one side is heavily publicly subsided with none of the legal costs and the other had none of the subsidy and all the liability. [Name any consultancy competing against the IPCC]
And worse, if giving bad advice is acceptable within the public sector, then the law will dictate it is acceptable within the private sector and so eventually this immunity from liability will spread to all consultants who will all claim they have the same “academic” immunity from liability for bad advice.
Bad advice would be endemic – doctors would not be liable if they misdiagnose patients, surveyors if they wrongly advised a house was fit to buy, garages if they wrongly advised a car for safe to drive … in short, if academics get away with wilfully giving us bad advice …. in a short time, no one will be able to trust anything anyone says.
All because we did not penalise those arrogant academics who thought they were omniscient and above the law.
“Name any consultancy competing against the IPCC” – I guess the closest you could get to that would be the GWPF. Perhaps also the Heartland Institute and Cato Institute. All of those, as far as I can tell, have realistic notions about climate change, its causes, and its potential effects that avoid the alarmism (and nonsense) of the IPCC. However none of them, as far as I’m aware, are employed by any governments anywhere to provide consultancy services on the subject so, as far as ‘competing’ is concerned, you’re probably right.
This is I feel the prime reason for this madness. The normal processes of government which bring in sane sensible people with a commercial outlook have been blocked from any involvement. The result is we have delusional academics with no sense at all of their lack of impartiality have a free orgy of giving more and more ridiculous advice and assertions.
Usually, they’d have been brought down to earth with a huge great wallop as one or other private sector consultancy spelt out the reality of how little they knew.
It’s not that the private sector are better than academia – it’s that they know how to give advice that isn’t wrong – at least isn’t so provably wrong as “we are sure it will warm”.
Yes. There was a push by hard core alarmists to have “deniers” flogged, imprisoned, and worse.
There is always extremists, but what I found to be “evil” was the way people like the BBC & even Church of Scotland ministers joined in the witch hunt against those whose only crime was to look at the evidence and assess it professionally.