How to achieve all this? That is where Capability Brown is our guide and here is how The Economist describes the strategy: "Brown eschewed long straight drives that took the visitor directly from the edge of a property to the house...He preferred people to travel along winding ‘lines of grace' and ‘lines of beauty'...‘Lose the object and draw nigh obliquely,' he is said to have said." 

And the Hartwellites' pragmatic policy point from this? The Economist explains: "Taking the climate itself as the object of policy, and making a beeline for a climate endpoint that you have been told is desirable...is an approach which has failed to have much practical impact to date...To make progress one needs to follow a more roundabout route." Our solutions are no Grand Bargain, no Great Design. They are clumsy solutions that make people cheerful; and that is a key virtue in them.

Personally, I believe that you can no more have a department of "climate change" than King Canute could have one of tidal reversal. It betrays an astonishingly hubristic overestimate of what governments can do, more common on the Left than the Right, of course. So it is greatly to be welcomed that a more modest assessment of what government can and should do is a general maxim of the Con-Lib coalition and is also a view that you have espoused in the past. For it is especially vital for everyone in your department to understand this. When confronting open, complex adaptive Earth systems of which humankind can only — and does only — possess incomplete understanding, we ignore the Iron Law of Unintended Consequence at our peril. Doing so during the last decade is an underlying reason why Britain now has no coherent energy strategy. So it is gratifying that the section of The Hartwell Paper which explains what science is most reliably able to contribute to the debate about anthropogenic global warming has been particularly welcomed by several science journalists. 

The point has general purchase across Whitehall which has become addicted in recent times to regarding reified "science" as a normative "driver" of policy when in truth it can be no such thing. When I hear pretensions of "horizon scanning", I reach for my revolver — and coming shortly, some intellectual Semtex. In fields like Earth systems, the most precious contribution of science recently has been to increase uncertainty, not to erase it. You need officials to tell you what they know that they don't know more than what they speculate that they do. Knowledge of ignorance, Socrates observed, is the beginning of wisdom; and the urgency of that insight is now acute.