Because We’re Worth It!

Michael Atiyah (honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh and former president of the Royal Society) co-opts a group of eminent scientists to write an open letter demanding the government take money away from other scientists and give it to them instead:

As senior scientists and engineers, we are deeply concerned that while the government is threatening to cut public funding for research and development as a whole, it appears to be committed to maintaining high levels of military-related R&D.

Let’s take a look at those ‘senior scientists and engineers’, shall we?

First, we have those who are currently filling their boots from the green scam as fast as they can:

• Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development, University of Surrey
• David Infield, Professor of Renewable Energy Technologies, University of Strathclyde
• Amyan Macfadyen, Professor (Emeritus) of Ecology and Environmental Science, University of Ulster
• Stephen Morse, Professor of Systems Analysis for Sustainability

And in amongst them, we have a few who, frankly, I can’t figure out what their angle is, other than ‘Military bad! Soft science good!’:

• John Sloboda, Professor (Emeritus) of Psychology, Keele University
• Christopher French, Professor of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London

And that attitude seems to permeate the letter. In fact, if I’d not seen the names of the signatories, I’d have assumed it was something from a Greenham Common protest march, circa the Eighties:

Official statistics indicate that the total public spending on R&D is currently about £8bn. Of this, the Ministry of Defence spends over £2bn, more than 25% of the total. Much of this funding is used to support defence industry projects at a time when the industry is reaping bumper profits thanks to a massive increase in global military expenditure over the last decade.

‘Waah! The eeeeeeevil military gets all the money! It’s not fair!’.

Mind you, they do – grudgingly – admit that there’s some use for the armed services. And that, of course, is in enforcing their own worldview at gunpoint:

However, there are some areas of security-related R&D that should be expanded, including those which support monitoring of arms control agreements, non-violent conflict resolution, and tackling the roots of conflict and insecurity.

You see, we can forget all those terrorists and unfriendly nations. Our real enemy is the very planet itself.

And, of course, the fact that not enough of the world has gone socialist yet:

The overarching threats to international security arise from rising fuel and resource costs, the impacts of climate change and other environmental problems, and the widening gap between rich and poor.

*sigh*

As commenter CforCynic points out:

Someone seems to have forgotten the huge number of scientific discoveries that have come off the back of military research.

Carbon Fibre & LCD are two, just from one of the organisations that I worked for a while back.

Quite.

Isn’t it a pity that so many of our ‘eminent scientists’ seem to be closet Marxist whackjobs?

Update: More 'science' ecofoolishness over at 'Counting Cats'...