I had an interesting exchange of tweets the other day with Tamsin Edwards. She had noted that she was off to a conference called Planet Under Pressure, and I gently inquired whether this was a suitable conference for a scientist to be attending at public expense - it certainly looks like an activist gathering to me, although in fairness there are also a few scientific sessions.
I think everyone would agree that the public is funding scientists to make scientific discoveries. Whether they are also paying for outreach efforts seems to me to be a moot point. The line between making the public aware of what is going on in science and using science as a tool in an ongoing political struggle seems to me to be one that is fraught with difficulty. There is little doubt that many residents of the ivory tower are little more than publicly funded political activists - a form of corruption if ever there was one. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don't believe that Tamsin E is one of these - indeed I'm not even sure that there are many such among the ranks of climate scientists, strictly defined).
Is there any way of making a clear delineation of what is acceptable or unacceptable for scientists to do with their public funding? Or is this sort of abuse and corruption of taxpayer largesse simply a feature of the system rather than a bug?