Dr. Anne Glover, chief scientific adviser to the president of the European Commission, was a welcome event for the science community when she got that job. Perhaps Europe would finally revisit the Science Enlightenment, and stop finding experts to endorse whatever polls say science policy should be.
It hasn't been easy. She has been targeted by both Greens and her boss for supporting the overwhelming consensus on biology. Her boss even publicly said when it comes to science, she is speaking her opinion - it's weird when a scientist only has an opinion...unless it matches political beliefs.
We can't claim the US is any better. The President's Science Czar, Dr. John Holdren, is a legendary Doomsday Prophet who wrote of population bombs, the need for mass sterilization and a world government to head off the starvation crisis before going into politics. His gloomy outlook is now used for climate change instead and when he claimed that last year's Polar Vortex was caused by man-made global warming and people wanted to see some data for that assertion, the Obama administration reminded the public that it was his "personal opinion" and he didn't need to show data for that.
Writing in The Guardian, Roger Pielke Jr. wonders if there might be a way to get science policy done using science. Good luck with that. Scientists are no more objective than the public about science when politicians invoke it - plenty of Democrats in science academia have rationalized Obama administration gerrymandering of environmental studies, stem cell research and physics, which aren't a lot different than what was done by Republican George Bush before him or Clinton before that. What is different is that Bush actually supported science more than both of them.
