Monday
Feb212011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill James Fleet on The Heretic
Feb 21, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Media James Fleet, who plays the part of Professor Maloney in The Heretic is interviewed on BBC Radio 2. Amusingly the line he pushes is that it is not a sceptic play.
Audio here from 1:19:00
(H/T Foxgoose in the comments)
Reader Comments (20)
It sounds like he has his own small, private doubts about the concensus, but can't quite bring himself to utter them out loud. (At leaset not on national radio).
"The temperature rise is probably enough to be worried about ... but scientists have exaggerated various things." What I find really amusing is that he gives the fact that Richard Bean cycles everywhere as evidence that the play is not the work of 'climate change deniers'.
But I think the massively important factor here is that the other, solemnly orthodox play has bombed and this is a rave critical success. James Fleet has worked a great deal with Richard Curtis, who is 'really funny'. It is bound to take a little while for past choices and mental models to unwind, given these close-knit relationships.
Without having seen the play, but as an ex-resident of Hampstead and fellow pupil of Curtis at an Ascot prep school, I can tell this is massive. It represents the end of the consensus in the London cultural scene. Given the dire impact of consensus policy making like biofuels on Africa's poor - people Curtis has had genuine concern for - it's high time. But it will take a little while for the egg to be wiped off so many faces, for the last eyeball to be scraped off the window.
The exact timing of that last phrase was an accident. At least, by me :)
Hey - I cycle everywhere! 45 miles yesterday in company with my local mad greenie. Who wittered on again about Koch Industries and Creationism.
But don't anybody think that I'm anything other than an archsceptic or I'll sue.
O/T, is anyone else now finding their comments are getting pre-moderated on the Daily Labourgraph? I haven't posted there for a while and I avoid the insult fests so I have no idea why I would have been singled out.
It sounds like he has his own small, private doubts about the concensus
My take would be that most people don't understand the relative positions. So he doesn't even understand that his is a skeptical opinion. My backing for this is the number of times that people ask me "... but surely you accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas". This is because the likes of Bob Ward have successfully framed the argument. [Of course this would fail utterly if the BBC et al actually challenged him on this point.]
Have I missed something, did Fleet say it’s a love story? I’ve obviously read the wrong reviews.
I saw the 2004 version of "Around the World in 80 days" on the TV over the weekend. It contained this hilarious line:
Very apropos.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2011/02/science-scepticism-and-consens.html
Beddington is now making some much more sensible points here than he did in his recent call for intolerance. Among the usual consensus talk there is this:
``It is time the scientific community became proactive in challenging misuse of scientific evidence. We must make evidence, and associated uncertainties, accessible and explicable. In a world of global communication, we cannot afford to only speak to ourselves. We must also be confident in challenging the misrepresentation or exaggeration of evidence and the conclusions it leads to. Where significant consensus exists, it must be made obvious.
In the Civil Service and other organisations with a stake in policy, we must guard against ideology, and consider the whole body of evidence, not just that which supports our own views.''
@ Matt Ridley,
Changed his tune a bit hasn't he!
@Richard Drake
"Without having seen the play, but as an ex-resident of Hampstead and fellow pupil of Curtis at an Ascot prep school, I can tell this is massive. It represents the end of the consensus in the London cultural scene."
Ian McEwan's Solar attempts to do that as well. Unfortunately Real Climate adopted Solar for their own purposes: a lot ealier. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/05/solar/
sHx: I also haven't read Solar (such commitment to the cause!) I agree it's worth mentioning because McEwan's highly respected and every little helps. But I don't think it's remotely comparable with The Heretic. The name tells you everything you need to know about how the author really feels. Even the Bishop thinks it's amazing how much real science Bean squeezes in. Most critically, going from Michael Ball's intro and many other indicators, it's clearly the hot ticket in London right now. "I tell you, darling, climate doom is so last season."
TDK: Very good point, that Fleet is a sceptic but doesn't know it. All he knows is that he's not one of those horrid 'deniers'. We have to be patient about a lot of this. People aren't totally rational - but they're not totally irrational either. Gradually, as the smart brains like Curtis and Fry follow brave men like Bean (and that's a silly name for Rowan Atkinson to conjure with!), the worm will well and truly turn. At which point I will make one prediction only: Vicar Beddington of Bray will change his tune again and will sound ever such a sensible, sceptical chap. What an ally to have in the trenches - when he's not shooting you in the back.
I've been thinking again how we should have 'the conversation' with those like Fleet who have been horribly muddled by the Bob Wards and co. Fleet and many others are prepared to concede that scientists have exaggerated some of the stuff. So we start there and very fervently agree with them on that - Himalayan glaciers, polar bear populations, hockey stick, Antarctic warming, Amazon forests, whatever the example de jour is. But then, the Wards and Beddingtons will always cry, none of that affects the core science behind CAGW.
At which point (and this is the new thought) we should again very fervently agree. Because it's true. The case for CAGW is as strong today as it was before Climategate, as it was in 1988 indeed. And there's the rub. How strong is that? Non-existent is where I stand - with the 'crazies' like Dick Lindzen. Lukewarmers say something subtlely different, so I'm told. But, whatever, it's a disastrously weak case. And yes, that hasn't changed.
Agreeing with people is always a devastating way to begin the conversation but this just came to me: the two phase agreement that will lead people smack bang into the really crucial issue, the evidence for strongly positive feedbacks and high climate sensitivity. The hole there is the same as it has even been.
Now I think I'll go and lie down!
Slightly OT - but very important.
Whist browsing a surprisingly enthusiastic review of Heretic on Tree Hugger, I came across some startling information.
Apparently, there's a "green" way of having sex!
I had previously thought that environmentalists reproduced in much the same way as the rest of us - but apparently not.
It's all here (but those of a queasy disposition might want to heed the "adult content" warning - I kid you not)
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/02/how-to-go-green-sex.php?campaign=TH_sbl_htgg
@Foxgoose
Well spotted. This must be how they (re)produced the consensus.
@Richard Drake
Very good set of comments. Thank you. I haven't read Solar either, but I read many reviews. It seems to me the book isn't taking a strong position either way and its chief protagonist, a Nobel Prize winner, doesn't come out well. If the writer was anyone other than McEwan the book might have condemned, but it seems the high priests of CAGW fear and respect him.
Also, you are quite right in suggesting that many people don't know about climate skepticism. When I first dipped my toes into the debate one of the first blogs that I came across was Bishop Hill. Believe it or not, I first had to ensure that Bish wasn't some anti-science, creationist nutter, so I checked to see if he had a habit of quoting the scripture. Anyway, the post was about Yamal tree rings, and His Grace did a wonderful job of explaining what Steve McIntyre could not.
Frankly, I could not believe that the idea that the recent warming was unprecedented came down to only a dozen or so 'calibrated' trees. And of course, there was no going back for me when Climategate emails revealed that Keith Briffa himself held private doubts about the 'unprecedented' nature of recent warming. He shared those doubts with his small scientific circle. They didn't think the rest of the world deserved to know anything about uncertainties. We could not think for ourselves apparently. All we had to do was to follow what they, that modern priestly class, told us with absolute certainty.
sHx: thank you. It's very good to hear your story. The AGW balloon was punctured for me by an irate exploration geologist with a couple of PhDs in a cafe in Bristol around 1992! But the cool thing about true science is that it allows human beings to share something that is truly objective - though always tentative. Critical realism, as I learned to call it a few years before that vital encounter.
Which makes me very interested in what else there is that we can share. Francis Bacon, often cited as a pioneer of the scientific method, suggested the 'two books' approach, where there were two perfect repositories of truth, Nature and the Scriptures - and our imperfect attempts to get at these and integrate what we learn from them. That part of the Baconian approach is not talked about so much these days but I've found it a helpful model.
More broadly, there is something more than science to share. Bertrand Russell said "I know that love is better than hate but I don't know why." Stephen Hawking has pointed out that even if we discover the Grand Theory of Everything unifying quantum theory and general relativity we still won't know why the universe "bothers to exist". That question why is what we also share. And I didn't quote any scripture in seeking very humbly to say so!
I saw The Heretic last night and I had the extremely strong impression that Richard Bean has been reading this blog in particular, as well as others of a similar persuasion. He has probably also read The Hockey Stick Illusion, I suspect quite carefully.
The number of boxes that were ticked, so to speak, was truly remarkable, as in number of things said that would have had CAGW-ists wincing with annoyance, and which all who read this blog and agree with its approximate attitude (which includes me) would have at once recognised with a smile (as I did). The 2035 instead of 2350 melting glaciers thing perhaps being the most memorable, because it featured so strongly in the plot, as the moral low point of the character that the Heretic was up against. He, "Professor Maloney", did this on purpose.
I had no wince moments at all that I can recall, apart from the occasional bits in the second half where Bean (in the person of his Heretic heroine) lapsed into preach mode. I would have quite liked most of these preachings had I encountered them in a blog posting, but I don't like preaching in plays, unless it's a play about a preacher, and even then it gets tiresome. That small grumble aside, it was very entertaining, a quite large amount of time passing amazingly fast. My companion, an actress and comedienne with no particular interest in the whole global warming thing (in either direction), was even more impressed than I, declaring it to be a very, very well written play with wonderfully entertaining characters and dialog.
There was no evidence that I could hear from the audience of any great opposition to what we were being told. Nobody, for instance, ever said: "Rubbish", that I heard.
The Official Left line is now mutating, if this play is anything to go by, into the claim that university science is being corrupted by public spending cuts, and by having to go whoring after corporate money (which I daresay is true in some cases). The point being, the corruption was presented as plain fact.
I have not read all the other comments on this posting, and while I did read the one about it being a love story, I don't know if anyone else has commented on this. And yes, it is a love story, among other things. About how the evil professor still loves the Heretic, and is morally somewhat redeemed by the end, and about how the Heretic's daughter loves one of the Heretic's students. (Spoiler alert) It ... (stop now!) ... ends with them all going to a wedding.
I got a copy of the text of the play while at the theatre. I hope (but don't promise) to do a review of The Heretic, Real Soon Now.
Thanks Brian
I exchanged emails with Richard and he has read the Hockey Stick Illusion. Look forward to seeing your review.
Roots and shoots. Further congratulations for how HSI has been seminal in turning the tide Andrew.
Fred Pearce already alluded to that in his review of The Heretic"
"Dramatic licence is fine, but too often, Bean offers formulaic boffin-bashing culled from nasty blogs."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/11/the-heretic-climate-change-review?INTCMP=SRCH
There is definitely a tinge of jealousy in that statement. Pearce would prefer to see the words of established authors, journalists and scientists held at higher esteem than those of "nasty" bloggers. The problem with this take is that bloggers are way ahead of everyone else in the game. Skeptical bloggers saw the CAGW science for a bucket of bullshit that it was while the likes of Fred Pearce and his colleagues were still trying to sell climate dogmatism to their readers. Now they watch in envy as skeptical bloggers get the credit that they deserve.