Monday
Jan242011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Goldacre on Nurse
Jan 24, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Royal Society (Well he is a doctor after all) :-)
Ben Goldacre has some interesting comments about the media's treatment of Delingpole today.
delingpole clearly a penis, and he's citing it for wrong reasons, but "peer-to-peer" review is not an insane idea
god, i'm really sorry, i like Nurse, but this is kind of slow, feels like a bit of a duty watch.
[Delingpole] is absolutely a dick. but that was weak, and if it was their killer moment, makes the press activity of today a bit ugly tbh
well, sorry, delingpole didnt do brilliantly on a question, and fumbled, but they say they interviewed him for 3 hours. thats the killer mo?
if that was the killer delingpole moment that the bbc have been crowing about all day then i'm actually quite unimpressed
Reader Comments (68)
With Delingpole appearing on the program and being labelled a sceptic rather than a denier then this will only serve to increase the traffic through his blog, there was also a piece by Booker highlighted. I would guess that Monbiot is secretly seething right now that his efforts did not even warrant a mention.
My feeling was that the program was pointing those who wanted to find out more information towards the sceptical side of the media rather than the warmist side.
If there was anything to stipulate that there is a debate going on in the press, although mainly contained in individuals blogs which viewers may have been unaware of, then I thought that point was made clearly. If the program content was to persuade the audience that the 'consensus' view was the only viable option and the press included in the program were deniers then the producer shot himself in the foot.
Anyone watching that did not already participate in the blog debates have now got points of refference to find out more. I didn't recall any mention of where peer reviewed papers could be accessed and discussed!
Nurse didn't look at the science. He went to NASA as his experts. I guess a lot of the satellites he was told about were financed by the scare as well. He compared climate science to real science, such as the potato field trial. These will be double blind randomised experiments that are reproducible by anybody who cares to repeat the experiment. That's the crux of science, repeatable outcomes from the same experiment. Models are not experiments, they do not produce data.
He condemns the green movement over GM foods, which have massive KNOWN benefits. He condemn bloggers for doubting the 'science' of AGW in which there are very few experiments.
He should read the motto of the august society he represents I quote wiki The motto, "nullius in verba", is Latin for "Take nobody's word for it", and was adopted to signify the Fellows' determination to establish facts via experiments; it comes from Horace's Epistles, where he compares himself to a gladiator who, having retired, is free from control". Note the words experiment and free from control.
So to answer his question to delingpole. I would take the advice of a scientist who has carried out double blind randomised tests on the treatment for cancer'. Who publish their data and who have no vested interests either way. I would not reach for the authority of a group who have not looked at the science.
Sir Paul Nurse: You have let the society down. You have done sterling work in medical science. For that work alone you deserve high office. You have become what the original founders of the RS tried to avoid.
Shame
The question I would like to ask publically to Sir Paul Nurse or any other prominent warmist is 'would you be prepared to take a lie detector test?'. With a question along the lines of 'I believe 100% that man is causing catastrophic change to the climate'.
Jan 25, 2011 at 7:53 AM | SandyS
Re Snip - direct quote from referenced post which is still there. Sorry I'll just reference the name and date in future.
The Horizon programme was, to anyone who knows about the issues, an exercise in propaganda. It tried to give the appearance of being neutral, but in fact was careful to avoid giving arguments against the 'scientific consensus' a fair hearing. Using techniques like interviewing alarmists in front of very expensive technology to accentulate their points, whilst interviewing the sceptic Singer in cafe. Like the ludicrous association of great figures of the past such as Newton, Boyle and Darwin with climate scientists of the present like Phil Jones. We all know the BBC is institutionally biased on the subject of Climate Change, so such propaganda is no surprise. But what about Sir Paul?
For me the interesting questions are whether he just presented the programme as scripted by the BBC, without himself examining the issues; whether he has adopted the AGW line because he would never get the peerage that usually goes with the presidency of the RS without doing so; or whether he really believes in AGW and is prepared to propagandise for the 'greater good'.
Sandy
Can you give point me to the original, and I'll remove it.
Particularly revealing was the segment where they discuss the "WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999" (pdf available online). It features Jones' graph on the front cover. Clearly it was intended to be eye-catching.
At about 21m17s there's this exchange:
Jones:
Nurse:
Jones:
So the WMO, with Jones' help, set out to deliberately mislead their audience - but with the best of intentions of course. This was apparently quite acceptable because all the basic science was in the peer-reviewed literature.
Just about sums up climate science.
snip snip snip:
is this the new non inflammatory attitude post Berry's Tucson speech ?
Dr Paul G- was very efficient (scientific I'd say) in his job :)
The lordship nurse tell us, the simple ones, that there is pentabytes of good data in Nasa's Goddard.
Yet an alarmist minion high up in the food chain (K Trenberth) told just recently in an exposed email that it's all inadequate ???
It is one or the other. The alarmists should feed us simple propaganda. please.
In above, check out the statement:
Re SandyS
I too was curious and have some friends who are HIV researchers, who I think may be after his blood now. Nurse did explain it briefly when he talked about uncertainty and treatments saying something like out of 100 treatments, 80 live, 20 die. 2 year survival rate without anti-virals was probably the expectancy at the time and is probably still the typical expectancy, but some last longer, some dont. Explanation I got was HIV progresses to AIDS based on CD4 and CD8 count. Once CD4 count drops below critical levels the immune system is so weakend the opportunistic infections take hold and it's into the end game. They say some patients have a better CD8 response than others, and those T-cells can kill the HIV-infected cells prolonging life expectancy. Hence I think their interest in his blood so they could count them. The healthier the person is on infection and the healthier they remain post-infection, the longer they can survive, and that's easier to do in more developed countries than poorer ones.
"Trust no-one. Trust only what the experiment and the data tell you."
Now, where does Nurse get his opinion from? Has he done experiments and evaluated the data? No, he's taking what seems to him like a plausible hypothesis constructed by his chums and trusting them to be right.
Peer review? Well, isn't that trusting in the peer review process: that's not experiment and data.
This takes me back to my days at the Clarendon Lab at Oxford in the 1970s. I would obtain experimental results much more carefully than most, and made sure they were properly presented as actual observational data (rather than massaging them to fit my preconceptions). If the data didn't fit the supervisors' preconceptions, who had never even done the experiment himself, my data was rejected. One comes to realize that much of so-called science is a social construct - in those days the society was the 'scientific community', nowadays it is the community shaped and funded by all sorts of rabid interests with particular agendas, and a lot of filthy lucre.
It is not at all surprising what happened with the team at CRU, and probably Nurse himself has been caught up in it: this sort of activity was first discovered by Steve Woolgar and Bruno Latour going on in the 1970s at the Salk Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla, California, in the laboratory of Nobel prizewinner Roger Guillemin. They published a book called 'Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts', which documents the whole range of activities that went on in Guillemin's lab, and reported that science was deeply associated with what sociologists now call 'actor-network theory' in which you create a framework of allies who, by the time you make your announcement, are already committed to applaud it as good work. Woolgar and Latour argued that the scientific community socially constructs scientific knowledge: they make claims whose 'truth' is determined by pal review and the scientific community standing up approving it. Then they give them the Nobel Prize, which 'guarantees' that what they did was 'correct'. Sound familiar? By the way, their book was published over 30 years ago, when I was doing physics, and things have got a lot worse since.
James P said: "Funny how the precautionary principle gets invoked in support of a wild hypothesis like AGW, but is considered completely unnecessary where genetic modification might produce nasty surprises"
Would we even be considering GM if it weren't for biofuels taking food from the markets and agricultural subsidies preventing free trade?
Scottie said: "Naive because he assumes that only peer reviewed papers have any value - other interpretations are not worth considering."
If requirements for data and method transparency were consistently applied and journals unable to become captured by a very narrow scientific view might we have more faith in peer review? If that isn't likely and doubts remain then peer-review is in danger of becoming a joke as far as climate science is concerned. To some extent it is as if climate science is a caricature of science. It mocks the scientific method.
A sceptical approach to papers is also needed - getting published doesn't mean you're right. This has always been the case but media reporting of science is by and large atrocious, leading to the impression that a paper published in a prestigous journal must be correct.(I noticed Nurse laid *that* appeal to authority on thick at one point)
There's got to be an element of professional courtesy at work here. Nurse himself might be absolutely a stickler for the scientific method and unless proven otherwise will assume that of his science peers.
Well, I sent in my complaint. Not something I do very often, but in this instance I could not contain myself.
Re ScientistForTruth
Oh for a transcript. Nurse cherrybombed great soundbites like that throughout the documentary. With a transcript, it could be useful to take those points, like trusting the experiment and data and present examples where that trust in climate science has been flawed or misplaced due to error. Given the criticisms of the Oxburgh not-science inquiry, and the RS's own role in that process, who better than it's new head to review, and attempt to debunk once and for all some of the sceptical arguments and help restore the credibility of science? Surely that would be doing science a service? Or the public, if he looks more closely at exactly what climate scientists have been getting away with.
James P
Why is Goldacre sceptical about everything except AGW..?
The heart of his sceptical interest is medicine, or more accurately drug company trials, and alternative medicines. As a fundamentally left wing medical professional he is comfortable about rubbishing "big drug", as a doctor it suits him to rubbish "quackery". How ever as a left winger, who knows whats best for you type persona he finds it impossible to be open minded about AGW prefering instead to side with his kindred spirits.
"Why is Goldacre sceptical about everything except AGW..?"
As David S. writes, Goldacre isn't really sceptical at all. He concentrates the lowest of low-hanging fruit - homeopathy. But he operates within a narrow politically-correct sphere allowed by The Guardian and he lacks the courage to tackle much else.
Remember when he begged a pressure group to use him as a mouthpiece?
Bishop,
re-original, I think you have found and removed it.
Thanks
Sandy
Atomic Hairdryer Jan 25, 2011 at 12:35 PM
I'm not well versed in HIV/AIDs research but doesn't what you've said in your post kind of back up what the guy on the programme said. His argument was that by abusing the bacteria in the gut people reduced their ability to counter viral infections. In this state they were in a downward spiral if they didn't do something about it. His cure was to try and rebuild his natural defences, this included eating frozen yogurt. If the cherry picking which appears to have happened in other parts of the programme is anything to go by then I imagine frozen yogurt was but a small part of the regime.
It's an interesting theory, and by no means unique.
Sandy