Bishop Hill Paul Nurse on sceptics again
Mar 9, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Royal Society Paul Nurse was interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose recently. The video can be seen here, with a transcript on the same page. Much of the conversation is only of indirect relevance to readers here, but there are parts of the interview - when Nurse revisits the subject of scepticism - which are fascinating.
PAUL NURSE: Science is important because it’s the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about the world and ourselves. There’s something about science and the way we do it. It’s to do with respect for observation and experiment. So you don’t cherry pick data. Half the problem with all the climate change debate .
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
PAUL NURSE: . is because different protagonists just collect -- cherry pick certain bits of data. They treat it like a sort of debating argument rather than a scientific one. Science respects all the data, like on this table, and tries to make sense of all of it. That’s one thing.
Secondly, science is very skeptical when it’s done well. You always challenge your own theory. You’re own worst enemy for your own theory. So what this means is that when you construct a theory or an idea that explains how things work, you challenge it. You attack it. You never let it alone. That means over the years, a theory or an idea gets better and better because it’s been challenged for so long. And that’s why sometimes we think science is very secure, like Newton’s laws of motion. And sometimes we don’t think it’s secure at all because it’s right an early point in the study and we’ve not done it. So the constant attack makes it better.
And the third point, which, again, is something that not everybody understands is there is a community of scientists who are challenging these ideas, challenging the data. And when they come to a consensus about it, you’ve got many, many minds who have been convinced that something is happening. And that isn’t trivial. And it’s part of the sociology of the process that actually makes science secure. So science is important because of this very reliable generation of knowledge and, therefore, understanding.
CHARLIE ROSE: Has the Internet been a double-edged sword?
PAUL NURSE: The Internet is a double-edged sword. It allows people to communicate.
CHARLIE ROSE: To say anything they want to.
PAUL NURSE: But they can say anything they want, and what it means is -- is -- and sometimes I’ve argued that it’s no longer peer-review that’s so important but point of view. The Internet allows anybody to say anything, and even if they’re totally unreliable, and that distorts science, actually, because they’re not behaving in a way -- you know, if you, again, the climate change debate .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
PAUL NURSE: . which I’ve looked at a little bit in recent months. If you read all the blogs, and so on, people are just rude (ph) about each other .
CHARLIE ROSE: Right. Right.
PAUL NURSE: .. they use it as a debating trick.
CHARLIE ROSE: But didn’t they take on you at some point in some capacity or .
PAUL NURSE: No, no, I was interested and I did a program for the BBC on trust in science.
CHARLIE ROSE: That’s what it was.
PAUL NURSE: On trust in science. And I only used climate change as an example of how trust can be undermined, if anybody can say anything and it’s treated with equal weight to people who really know what they’re talking about.
CHARLIE ROSE: Somebody once said you’re entitled to your opinion but you’re not entitled to the facts.
PAUL NURSE: Yes. Exactly right. And the facts -- and what I think in all these big issues, actually, that we’re going to face is that you have to treat the science objectively. You have to separate it from the politics. It’s no good having politics and ideology influencing scientific argument.
CHARLIE ROSE: But did you suggest in the piece that you did on television that global warming has been damaged by .
PAUL NURSE: By exactly that. Because .
CHARLIE ROSE: Some people less believe it -- less now because there was a blip in the use of evidence?
PAUL NURSE: Well, it was so exaggerated, it wasn’t true. But what’s happened here is very, very interesting. You see, people have -- are very worried about the impact that if there’s global warming might have before you respond to that on economic growth and on the economy. Quite rightly so, because I mean, it will have a big impact. But they’re so worried about it, I think what they’re doing is they are trying to show that the science doesn’t actually illustrate that so they don’t have to take on the problem. And that’s because they don’t like that sort of interference in the economy. So their political views are influencing the science.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes. But you know what’s fascinating about this, too, is that people you’d be surprised by who you’ve admired for other reasons, you know, have bought into the idea of challenging some of the assumptions about global warming. I mention the late Michael Crichton as one.
PAUL NURSE: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: He was a novelist, but he had an M.D. from Harvard, he was a very bright guy. He understood art, he understood a lot of things. Freeman Dyson.
PAUL NURSE: You know, we had -- we had both -- I mean we have Michael give a talk at Rockefeller .
CHARLIE ROSE: Yes.
(CROSSTALK)
PAUL NURSE: . before he died.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right. And now Freeman Dyson.
PAUL NURSE: Yes. Also.
CHARLIE ROSE: The physicist who came here to talk about it.
PAUL NURSE: And, you know, this is, you see, I’m all in favor of skepticism and argument.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
PAUL NURSE: OK. And I think it’s good to have a range of views. What I don’t like so much is when very small arguments are hugely exaggerated as if they’re very, very important, and then when you, you know if there’s a temperature change here, that it’s just -- it counters what one expects, when all of NASA’s measurements say something else, and then you read blogs and they just focus on this and ignore everything else. That’s not good science.
Interesting stuff. I'm particularly intrigued by the idea that the critics of mainstream climate science have exaggerated things - presumably the importance of the Climategate and the paleoclimate studies. This suggests to me that Sir Paul hasn't really examined the story in sufficient detail: after all, it was the IPCC that put the Hockey Stick into the Third Assessment Report in six different places. It was Sir John Houghton who launched the report in front of a very large blow-up of the graph. It is not sceptics who have exaggerated the importance of paleoclimate (and Climategate, which resulted from it), but the IPCC. As I say in the Hockey Stick Illusion, the problem is not that the Hockey Stick was central to the global warming hypothesis but that the IPCC promoted it as if it were.
If climatology is ever to return to some semblance of normality, it is going to have to deal with the fact that it is impossible to do paleoclimate temperature reconstructions with any accuracy (as Jones has now apparently admitted). Then somebody is going to have to explain to the public why the IPCC has been saying something entirely different for the last ten years. I don't think it is unreasonable for sceptics to demand public recognition of what the scientists are saying to each other privately.
Normal sciences do not hide the decline and they do not use sales tools like the Hockey Stick and they do not pretend they know more than they do. All these corruptions of science should be condemned by Paul Nurse. He does not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater: "Hide the decline was wrong but the hypothesis still stands" is a valid point of view. However, silence on hide the decline looks suspiciously like complicity and that would be unfortunate.
Everyone in the scientific establishment and in climatology should be speaking out and condemning the malpractice exposed by Climategate. Only then will we get a chance of normality in climate science and a rational debate on global warming.
Reader Comments (57)
richard verney:
“I doubt that what he has to say is very influential. Most people do not know his name and in today's celebrity culture some blabberings by someone no one has heard of is unlikely to carry much public sway and influence”.
Probably true. Brian Cox’s two-word dismissal of the Durkin film - “it’s bollocks” was probably more convincing. But in our complex society you need both strings to your bow when discussing science - Cox’ winning smile and vulgar one-liners to sway the intellectual élite who watch televised lectures about science, and the blabbering of the President of the Royal Society in the background to add scientific weight to the argument.
“The Internet is a double-edged sword. It allows people to communicate” is surely one of the great quotes of our age.
You could say the same thing about universal literacy, and no doubt some Pope or Divinely appointed monarch did.
Thanks for the discussion page Bish. Just posted a link on it that is a must. I would love to listen to Nurse being interviewed by the two guy in the link I left!
"PAUL NURSE..."sometimes I’ve argued that it’s no longer peer-review that’s so important but point of view."
Although he stated this in the context of the evil, distorting, untrustworthy blogosphere, he could have been describing post-normal science and the AGW Consensus.
I certainly agree with other commenters that Prof. Nurse does not appear to have looked at climate change very carefully. Consider this quote:
Does anyone believe for a moment that Prof. Nurse has done this himself for global warming theories? No, of course not. It is difficult to do this and it takes time, especially - as here - when the topic is so far from his own area of expertise. So on this matter, he is going on trust - people who he knows and respects tell him that things are this or that way, and he believes that they know that from other trustworthy people, and he believes that those people have done all the challenging and attacking.
Furthermore, does Nurse really think that every scientist does the above for his or her own theories all the time and in every respect? Surely he can't! The history of science is full of examples of cases where people, in retrospect, were too uncritical of the theories they had. It is difficult to step back from ones own theory and seek out all the best arguments against it. And that's before small-p political biases and group dynamics intervene to make it more difficult to criticize certain theories in certain ways (again, there are many examples of this).
My experience is that many scientists, even the very good ones, are quite naive with respect to the theories they have about philosophy and sociology of science. In practice, and in their own field, good scientists understand how things work very well. They are very good at detecting and discounting the spin that is at work when someone is trying to promote a hypothesis (note that a bit of this spin is an integral part of science, which is after all a human pursuit), or recognizing the way in which basic tenets can go unchallenged for long times within certain fields due to confirmation bias and personalities. But they are less good at recognizing this outside their field, because their theoretical view of how science works does not really allow for these things. So they tend to go on trust and on argument from authority.
It would be nice to see Paul Nurse have a long, careful debate with someone like Judith Curry.
j said: “Does anyone believe for a moment that Prof. Nurse has done this himself for global warming theories? No, of course not. It is difficult to do this and it takes time, especially - as here - when the topic is so far from his own area of expertise.”
j, I’m afraid that I disagree strongly with your statement. I’m in no position to say if he has or hasn’t but, given the way CAGW is being used to justify some of the biggest socio-economic changes outside of wartime, I’d certainly expect him to have taken at least a cursory look. He is, after all, a Nobel Prize winning scientist who now heads a leading scientific institute that governments take note of and so should be perfectly capable of making a rational assessment of the readily available data from the IPCC.
If he did so, I believe he would find that, as most sceptics would agree: a) the Earth is warming (and has been warming for several centuries); b) CO2 is a greenhouse gas by virtue of its absorption/radiative properties and so has the potential to cause warming. The idea of Anthropogenic Global warming (AGW) has, therefore, some scientific basis because it’s easy to verify the warming potential of CO2 in a laboratory. The problem is that this mechanism has a rather limited potential, due to saturation effects, so that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would only result in about 1C of global temperature rise (i.e. a sensitivity of 1C); a level that both ‘deniers’ and ‘believers’ agree is not really a serious problem.
The case for CAGW is, however, subtly different because it assumes that a multitude of feedbacks within the climate system result in an overall net-positive feedback effect that ‘amplifies’ the CO2 sensitivity to anywhere between 2C and 6C (or higher, depending on your reference), which are levels that I think most sceptics would agree represent a serious problem. However, the concern raised by sceptics – and something that becomes abundantly clear when reading the AR4 WG1 documents – is that there is, as yet, no real-world evidence for this overall net-positive feedback effect and, therefore, no scientific basis for CAGW. There’s certainly an abundance of model based evidence, but I don’t expect someone with Sir Paul’s scientific background would consider this, on its own, as hard scientific evidence.
Worse still (and by there own admission), the proponents of CAGW cannot make one unambiguous prediction that is verifiable/falsifiable via real-world data (i.e. CAGW is not testable via the Scientific Method), usually because either the signal is buried too deep within the noise or because the levels of uncertainty (i.e. error bars) are so high. This means that their ‘proof’ relies upon complex computer models, based upon an array of physical processes that, in some instances, are still poorly understood such as the effect of clouds; one of the most influential yet least understood feed-back mechanisms (N.B. all of this is clearly stated in the IPCC AR4/WG1 reports).
This situation means that CAGW proponents inevitably argue the “precautionary principle” or invoke the concept of “post-normal science” that defines ‘proof’ in terms of “consensus” rather than real-world evidence. It’s also the reason why sceptics consider CAGW as being more akin to religion than science.
Of course, all of this would not really matter if the debate was confined to just science journals or blogs. The real problem is that CCAGW is being used as the basis for some of the biggest global socio-economic initiatives ever proposed and, worse still, seems to be a cure that’s going to be much worse, in terms of human suffering, than the actual disease (which may not even exist)… bio-ethanol, anyone?
Dave, I did not say that Nurse should not have made a better effort to find out about climate science, and to explore possible problems with it, before speaking about it - I said that I was pretty sure he had not done so. Hence his statements about theories having been challenged and attacked could not possibly apply to him having done so.
Fair enough, j; my misunderstanding.
However, given his current position and professional background (and the fact that an average bloke like me managed to piece together the basics from a few hours reading of the WG1 reports), I think your observation is a pretty damming indictment of either his complacency, complicity or just plain laziness, though doubt it’s the latter.