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.