Bishop Hill Royal Society openness meeting
Jun 8, 2011 FOI Royal Society Cameron Neylon is tweeting from today's ROyal Society meeting on "Science as a public enterprise". A couple of BH readers are there, so I hope to get some more detailed reports of what was said too.
Here are some highlights from the twitterers
"The focus on publication - of paper and data - is too narrow."- William Dotton, OII
Emmott: Open Science not a movement, just getting back to the scientific method
It's quite something to open your question with the statement, "I'm going to start by correcting something Sir Paul Nurse said"
mtg is heating up... Arguments about goodies and baddies in climategate... Oo er
I think "I used to run the Met Office" is probably the coolest start to a question from the floor that we will see today
From floor: "if RS only focusses on data...risk losing public trust...must also focus on the code in the computer" #openscience
Reader Comments (60)
Ok, I give up, who said
DrJennyWoods
I think "I used to run the Met Office" is probably the coolest start to a question from the floor that we will see today
..and what happened next?
Looks interesting, wish I was there and not in Sw France. No I don't really!! :))
That is not a question, it is a statement.
Looking forward to more info' on the Paul Nurse reference.
It was a fun afternoon and I have pages of visual notes from which I will draw up something when I can. There were a good number of excellent speakers, Cameron being one of them. And a lot of interesting things were said, so I hopefully someone will be doing an erudite summary soon.
Sir Paul was ticked off by Doug Keenan for repeating the phrase 'bombarded by FOI requests' when referring to the CRU complaint that they received too many requests to cope with. Bombarded was clearly not the right word to use and Doug was right to make the point. But it was an uncomfortable moment for Sir Paul.
I wonder whether the RS will do a write-up ... and if so whether Doug Keenan's correction of Sir Paul will be mentioned?
Surely almost anything is cooler than saying "I used to run the Met Office" - including "I have never had anything to do with the Met Office".
Cameron? The PM? Or another?
If the former, what did he say?
I had a chat with Sir Paul as he walked out with a colleague from the Royal Society after the first half, the Nobel prizewinner having had the pleasure of a further face to face discussion with Doug in the interval. I also talked to Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, at the end. It was good chatting to and hearing from Peter Murray-Rust and Nick Barnes too - and of course Josh, Doug and Davids Holland and Henderson. But Cameron Neylon is the man with the clearest vision of open science and where it needs to go, for me.
The 'bombarded with FOI' phrase was the only mention Sir Paul made of the climate area. Nothing else to be learned, just how to deal with the mad or the bad who bombard poor scientists with FOI. Doug was right to pick him up on the 'bombarded' - what nobody asked is "Is that everything there is to learn from this area, even after Climategate?"
Still, there was more intelligent movement that before. The guy from Nature mentioned that one of the GCM efforts had asked for a grant of $300k to clean up, document and 'open' its codebase for general use/perusal but the application was turned down. I asked Nick Barnes if he knew which one that was. He didn't but is meeting with Nature soon and would find out. I think that story is important to have the details of.
I mentioned to Sir Paul that the choice of Geoffrey Boulton to chair the Royal Science's commission on openness in science was not seen as a great one by the sceptical community. He thinks the man is an officer and a gentleman. I didn't press the point.
What I did pick up is that Nurse has been surprised by the extent of the 'hate mail' on the climate front. I think that's genuine surprise. He said in his defence that he had criticised CRU for not being open with data and code and I agreed that in the Horizon documentary he did ask the right question of Phil Jones on that.
I think Sir Paul is feeling his way into the job. I certainly think he's taken the word of the climate scientists too uncritically. I think he needs to read the Hockey Stick Illusion, if he hasn't already. But when he emphasized to me that he'd only been in the job less than a year I felt that we should give him a little bit of leeway.
I wanted to ask Mark Walport about DDT and malaria but I started by saying that as fellow climate sceptic I agreed with Doug that he'd made a very good presentation. He was a bit embarrassed by this and said rather forcibly "Thank you - but I think you're quite wrong!" I didn't argue the point and explained that because of my doubts about what environmentalists have said in the one area I had taken a much closer look at the DDT story. I knew from his earlier answers that Wellcome is sponsoring much research in the malaria field.
I felt his attitude change significantly at this point. He agreed that many African leaders feel very strongly that they should be allowed to use DDT without pressure from the West not to. He even seemed to agree with me that perhaps DDT was an example where more openness in the original 'science' might have stopped a scare story becoming way out of hand and causing great grief of the poorest.
It wasn't what he was expecting from the average climate sceptic: concern for the poor in Africa and the affect of our bad science on them. I may have misread the guy but I felt there were lessons in that somewhere.
The argument that the poor in Africa (mainly, but elsewhere also) will be the first to suffer unless we "do something" about climate change is completely fallacious.
One of the prime reasons for increasing poverty in less-developed nations is the increase in food prices caused by the insane drive for bio-fuels. The more we impoverish ourselves with these pointless exercises in eco-madness, the more we impoverish the whole planet and the poorest will be the ones to suffer most.
As they always are.
I am not the only one to hammer on at the fact that something less than one-quarter of the funding that is supposed to be committed under the Kyoto accord (which, if implemented, would have the effect of reducing global temperatures by about .007 degrees, if that) would provide the whole of sub-Saharan Africa with clean drinking water and proper sanitation.
Of course our Green friends have been very solicitous and very successful about ensuring that anyone who doesn't sign up 100% to the Green Bible is condemned as uncaring of his fellow beings. Ironic, since it is the eco-warriors and their neo-Malthusian cohorts who are deternined that the poor of this world will remain just that!
Doug Keenan would make a very good president of the Royal Society. When is Sir Paul resigning?
Actually, Sir Paul's primary concern is overpopulation: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6350303.ece.
But that is just the kind of cute phrasing that gets all the benefit of emotive power without the hard work of scientific precision. Nurse should not be allowed to get away with just saying that unless he can also say out loud what type of, and how many, FOIs become a "bombardment" so we can hear what he considers as too much inquiry into climate science. Otherwise there is no evidence he has thought it through any better than a trade union leader making a dodgy case for his put-upon members
Mike, wholly agree about the effects of so-called AGW 'mitigation' on the poor, including the biofuels shambles. But I was trying to listen today. I asked Paul Nurse what he thought of climate dissenters he's had contact with, like Doug Keenan and Steve McIntyre. After telling me that in his view both men had been unnecessarily rude he looked me firmly in the eye and said "Such people don't seem to be listening, they seem to be driven by ideology." I mentioned I'd had a very nice cup of tea with Steve in the very cafe at the Festival Hall we were just passing and what a dear chap he was, in effect. But there's little point in getting angry.
My overall point (and I'm genuinely keen to get this straight in my own mind) is that, whether by accident or design, climate sceptics (and Steve doesn't even accept the description) have been painted as adherents of an uncaring ideology that loves oil and money but not people and the environment. People like Nurse and Walport, it seems to me, have bought into this, at least to some degree. Our mission, should we wish to accept it, is to change that impression utterly.
Today mention of the DDT debate seemed to flip the right switches for Walport. It surely won't always work. You're right, people like Nurse have not been listening. They have other things on their mind - as the breadth of today's discussion amply showed. I want to make the most of the rare opportunities I have face to face with such people.
ZT, thanks for the link, I'd forgotten that Nurse had hosted that meeting in his former role as president of Rockefeller University. I'm not at all sure that it proves that his primary concern is overpopulation. We don't know his contribution that day. I haven't seen clear statements from him that would substantiate this.
The impact the overpopulation people like Ehrlich had in the 60s and 70s on the decision to ban or phase out DDT, on the other hand, is a scandal of the first order. It's one of the biggest things I took in from the book 'The Excellent Powder' earlier this year. Donald Roberts and Richard Tren also make the point that such measures are counterproductive, in that families that know they may lose many children to malaria just have more children. Hopefully by now such basics are not ignored by the super-rich. I've been impressed with Gates' focus on the value of every indivual human being in his philanthropic phase.
Don't know the answers, thanks for the reminder of this and Nurse's involvement.
Richard
Thanks for the detail - this is very helpful. I'm slightly bemused by your reference to PN asking the right questions of Jones and PN's saying he had criticised Jones over FOI. I can't recall anything like this in the transcript of Horizon. What are you thinking of?
Very interesting comments. One of the great misunderstandings (propaganda) is that people who reject the CAGW conjecture (not even worth the hypothesis label) and renewable energy madness are immediately labelled as anti-environment and, usually, nothing could be further from the truth.
Well done Richard D., maybe Nurse will begin to think.
I found it slighly odd but, reassuringly Brittish, that the Royal Society seemed to be setting off on a consultation process to decide how "science" should deal with the new world of the Internet and increased expectations of openness and transparency, without even mentioning the existing legislative framework that requires it and determines both the obligations upon the scientists and the protections it provides for their legitimate concerns.
My suggestion that their deliberations ought to start with a full understanding of what the law required of them was dismissed with a statement from the panel to the effect that if they had to look at the matter from the point of view of the law as opposed to what science ought to do of its own volition, they were lost before they started. That, I thought, was spot on. They missed the "consultation" boat a decade ago and, whether they like it or not, it will be case law and not their deliberations that decides the cultural change that they will have to learn to live with.
I am afraid that Sir Paul Nurse has become a figure of fun and as we all know...
A figure of fun is just enough to give the kids a treat.
Nurse is nobody’s fool; the signs are that he is having problems transferring into the “elite” establishment. Maybe he won’t, maybe his inherent scepticism will kick back in.
I am not holding my breath for a “road to Damascus” moment with associated profound announcements but equally I will be surprised if the last few months experience has not got Sir Paul’s antenna twitching. How he handles it will be interesting but slow, very, very, no rocky boat, slow.
Three points: (i) The RS website was riddled with AGW certainty until a year ago. No longer the case. This is progress. (ii) Can an acknowledged expert in one field (say genetics) pronounce credibly on another, distant, field (say climatography)? (iii) Will the RS reiterate that, in climatography as in all science, falsifiability is a sine qua non.
Mike Jackson says: "I don't know of many serious sceptics who haven't at one time or other tried to make the point that the whole AGW scam is going to affect the poor most". Amen to that!
Very interesting report, Mr. Drake, and thanks for the reference to "The Excellent Powder". I lecture on DDT and the forgotten war against malaria. Many students have a closed mind on DDT. Amazingly, they will even give me one-sided anti-DDT rants in 'research' essays despite my open enthusiasm for using DDT in limited indoors anti-malarial applications, and my skepticism of some of the 'scientific' findings on the health effects of DDT. It's very hard to find 'neutral' information about DDT. And of course for many, the environment always trumps the lives of the distant poor. Indeed, malaria performs a useful, if unstated, service for those who obsess about world overpopulation. CAGW fanatics seem equally callous towards the poor. I wonder how Nurse would have responded to your DDT sally? CAGW fanatics seem equally callous towards the poor.
Agree that there are many sceptics who genuinely concerned for the poor in the developing world (and in the west - e.g. Scottish Power announced another 9% increase in electricity prices yesterday, that's on top of a 10% rise last November - that means increased fuel poverty, so more hypothermia and malnutrition-related diseases and mortality).
Nurse is clearly uninformed (which is maybe not unexpected considering the bollocks printed on the science and politics of global warming in the Guardian and BBC) but he really needs to get clued up now that he is in his RoyalSoc position. I suggest reads the HSI and Peter Taylor's Chill for a kick off.
Also good to see a sensible discussion of the DDT issue here - it is complex and I got fed up with the typical position taken by many sceptics over at WUWT who decry the ban; many forget that had the ban not been implemented, the mosquitos would have soon developed resistance and then we would have been in a worse position; a key benefit of the 1960's ban is that the UN agency which tackles malaria can still use DDT as an effective control when and where necessary. It is also worth stating that while it is far from perfect, the UN does still have some good agencies and policies, something which some sceptics are also quick to forget or ignore (when quite rightly exposing the IPCC for its flawed foundation, objectives and methods).
The fact that the RS has missed the internet bus is not peculiarly British but just another example of the phenomenon of 'cultural lag', typical of great movements for change in any age. Studies of the Italian Renaissance clearly show that the sharp end of cultural change (in that case a major shift from a God-centred society to a Science-centred one) probably took upward of three hundred years to fully bed in. It's not a generational thing, either, as many recently-retired professional people suddenly find they have large amounts of leisure time in which they can take up and fully utilise new technology to further their social and intellectual interests, whereas young people tend to inhabit the 'games and entertainment' end of the technology spectrum.
The point about PN being surprised that sceptics actually care about the poor rather defines the difference between the attitudes of the ruling elites and those of the 'common herd' from whence most sceptics come. Any sceptic who touches on the topic of fuel poverty in the UK (or similar topics) is demonstrating a concern for the elderly who will be the new poor if the iniquitous Green shamanism is fully implemented.
Richard Drake, please keep up the good work. I have neither the expertise nor the contacts that allow me casual chats with senior scientists so I must rely on you to do much of my "hammering away" for me!
What I find depressing about people such as Nurse, and you touch on it in your 9.26pm reply, is the way that they have managed to grab -- or more likely been handed -- the wrong end of the stick.
Was it not Nurse in his Horizon programme who equated climate change sceptics with those who oppose GM crops? The processes that led to that state of affairs would surely have left Orwell speechless with admiration!
I am sure that as far as the AGW science is concerned it is only by grabbing these opportunities as they present themselves that any progress will be made towards persuading people like Nurse that they have been sorely misled both as to the strength of the underlying science and the reality of the position which genuine sceptics hold.
But nevertheless it is alarming that scientists of his stature are either unaware of the body of contrary work by reputable climatologists or choose to ignore it.
Paul Nurse
As others have noted, he claimed that climate scientists were “bombarded by FoI requests”. During the question period, I stated that what Nurse had claimed was false, that there were in fact only a few requests, that the scientists involved with FoI requests had been repeatedly dishonest, and that the Information Commissioner had confirmed that some of the scientists were dishonest. Nurse tried to argue against this, saying that the scientists said that they had been bombarded. I replied that while it was true that the scientists said they had been bombarded, that was different from them actually having been bombarded—and that the latter was false.
During the intermission, I tried to talk with Nurse about the nonexistence of empirical evidence for global warming. Nurse first wanted to talk more about the bombardment. He justified his claim that climate scientists were bombarded by saying that if the scientists felt they were being bombarded, then there must indeed be too many requests. This is the sort of logic we get from a Nobel laureate who is president of the Royal Society? I could not think of a polite response, and I really wanted to talk about GW evidence; so I let it go.
Then I recalled the RS motto (“on the word of no one”) and said that he could radically change the GW debate if he could present two pieces of empirical evidence that support global warming. He said that I would have to talk with the climate scientists about that. To almost everything I said, he replied that it was up to me to convince the experts. I then responded that they were not experts—that they could not even pass an introductory course in statistical times series. None of this led anywhere.
Is Nurse corrupt or does he believe in what he says? I cannot tell, but tend towards the latter.
William Dutton (Director of the Oxford Internet Institute)
He made very positive statements about why data should be open. Then he said that it would be “ironic to mandate” openness. Rather, scientists should have the option.
Geoffrey Boulton
During his talk, he said almost all reasonable things about making data open. During the question period, he gave an example where he had a data set with 6 billion numbers and, he said, which required knowledge to understand that only some of his colleagues possessed; he thought the data set should obviously be exempt from the FoI Act. I considered calling him on this, but decided there was little point, because Boulton clearly has the same general level of integrity as his erstwhile colleagues Phil Jones and Trevor Davies. Of course, it is Boulton who is heading the RS study on scientific openness. Obviously, then, the report from the study is going to be highly biased.
Conclusion
The real mission of the RS study, as I understand it, is to influence the government on changes to be made to the FoI Act. My view is that the primary purpose of yesterday's event was to glad-hand advocates of open science, and that the RS is going to recommend to the government that there be many exemptions to openness—enough to make openness just an option for scientists.
Bish:
My words above were:
Nurse didn't claim to have criticised CRU about their response to FOI but definitely did claim he had done so about them not being open with their data and code. He clearly felt that he should have earned some respect from the likes of me for that.
That part I'm sure of, as a memory from yesterday. I thought that Nurse had raised the openness issue in the Horizon programme and I thought that he had made the point to Phil Jones that this witholding of data was surely not in the spirit of science. I don't have the transcript in front of me. But what I said to the man yesterday was in line with what I remembered.
@lapogus,
Interesting point. At one time I went along with the general enviro message about threatened species, DDT, ozone holes, acid rain, recycling, public transport, etc.
For a long time I went along withe the global warming ideas as well. In fact my change of mind was triggered by the feeling that no-one was really takingthe problem seriously. The whole world's climate going down the gurgler and the solution was to change our freaking light bulbs.This was so wrong by a factor of 100. So I did my own due diligence and soon the whole AGW thing just fell apart.
This caused me to question a lot of other greenie issues as well. The acid rain scare for example - all those trees dying in the Black Forest. What a crock. In fact because they have lied on some issues I just don't believe a single word they say. They have blown it.
Brent Hargreaves:
Great comment.
(i) There is definitely progress. A lot is down to Benny Peiser and the GWPF, including their FRS dissenters, in my book. It's amazing what's happened since David Henderson alerted Nigel Lawson to this area. We shouldn't forget to honor David for that.
(ii) Nurse (and I need to go carefully here) was I thought backing off just a little from standing shoulder to shoulder with his errant climatologist colleagues by the time he talked to me. I hadn't heard the interaction he'd just had with Doug because I was talking to the lady who'd raised openness in connection with malaria - it's fascinating to read Doug's account this morning. It was perhaps a little of bad cop, good cop in that I was gentler and praised the guy where I felt I could.
(iii) One of the great strengths of the meeting was that reproducibility and falsifiability were indeed put forth as the "sine qua non" of science. Stephen Emmott of Microsoft - yeah, I know, Big M on openness :) - made the point that they had tried to get some big scientific models working and only found bugs, not reproducibility. (He didn't say GCMs at the time but the editor of Nature later refered to this and said they were GCMs.) He was dead right to include models in with data and code - you need to have precise starting instructions and operating instructions for reproducing the published results of a model before it can be considered reproducible. We've gone back in the area of reproducibility in science because of complex software modelling, he and others said. This was all extremely welcome.
Vigilantfish:
lapogus:
I'm delighted to respond ... but give fair warning to all that it's a really, really big subject.
First I very strongly recommend 'The Excellent Powder' and Richard Tren and colleagues at Africa Fighting Malaria. For me it's a landmark work and in my experience Roberts and Tren are meticulous and honest, in print and in person, about the pros and the cons of DDT.
Second, I wouldn't quite agree with what you say lapogus. The problem about talking about the ban on DDT (and I've certainly been guilty of this) is that there have been many bans and as far as I know they have all made the distinction between DDT's use in agriculture and in public health. Even the USA, who kicked off the banning in 1972, reserved the power to use it in a public health emergency. And what we have with malaria in many countries is the biggest public health emergency they face, with an estimated 3,000 children and infants dying from malaria worldwide every day. Yet international organizations, aid donors and the policies of the EU for the import of foodstuffs (which mustn't have even a trace of DDT on them, despite that being totally safe) have combined to make it far more difficult to use DDT than it should be.
Your point about mosquito resistance is right - this was increased by large-scale agricultural use. But even before the banning in farming in the USA in 1972 an independent reviewer found that a ban was not justified on the evidence. With the connivance of Richard Nixon DDT became a pariah substance and, as Michael Crichton put it, greens wanting to make a name for themselves did tremendous damage across the world. And behind the greens (and I tend to make the distinction, though of course there's overlap) were the population control people. I was genuinely shocked about the way the latter influenced policy of international organizations in 1970s, to phase out DDT and thus 'benignly' reduce population through such horrible diseases.
Even mosquito resistance to DDT is much more complex than is made out, because resistance to its toxic effects is not the same as resistance to its repellent and contact-irritant effects. And it is as a repellent that DDT primarily halts malaria - from stopping mosquitos from coming inside houses. It's all in the book. Everyone should know these basics.
Jack H
“At one time I went along with the general enviro message about threatened species, DDT, ozone holes, acid rain, recycling, public transport, etc.”
Same here. I then I learned about massaged data, hidden agendas, journalistic bias and the law of unintended consequences. I lost my faith but found the Bishop (or should that be the other way round?)...
I am very grateful for the number of posters such as Richard Drake who have presented so much important and accurate information that has arisen from posters' comments. I was a Rotarian some years ago, before I relocated to the UK, and was very involved at a very minor level with Rotary's Malaria Eradication programme which was particulaly active and, I believe, effective, in the tropical Pacific Islands. For some strange reason, Greenpiece and other similar Green organisations seemed obstructive and very negative about this programme while WHO and other UN and government organisations seemed to ignore the caring attitudes and the practical projects such as this that ordinary people who are determined to be effective in improving the lives of their fellow man become involved in without banging any religious or ideological drum.
One thing I felt was missing from the Royal Society meeting was an apology.
On the one hand the speakers, who one supposes were endorsed by the RS, were all for openness, transparency and sharing. And on the other, principally from Sir Paul Nurse, they did not seem to be in favour of Freedom of Information requests.
As Cameron said - if you get to the point of an FOI then the scientist has failed.
So why not admit that CRU got it wrong? Why not publicly apologise for the lack of openness, the obscurity of Climate Science and the desperate attempts not to share data?
It makes this latest exercise look like another PR campaign - and not a very sensible one at that. If you want to win the public's trust and show you really mean open 'Open Science' then admit the mistakes of the past, don't do whitewash inquiries, and then move on to something better.
Richard I will buy the book, The Excellent Powder, many thanks for recommending it and for raising the subject here - wholly appropriate and relevant.
Would that he had said this while in government. It is uncanny how the "great and good" so often say sensible things when not in power but don't do them when they are. One might almost think that politicians who act like this aren't actually imbeciles in power but working for their own agenda.
Josh, thanks for the second comment; I believe that among other very important things The Excellent Powder sheds profound light on what we often, as shorthand, call the AGW scam. The DDT campaign proved what bad science could 'achieve' combined by unthinking environmental activism. Whether consciously or not it became a model for the 'big one'. But the case of DDT stands or falls on its own merits. I'm so grateful to Donald Roberts, Richard Tren and colleagues for taking out to lay the story out so fully.
I also strongly agree about the lack of apology yesterday. We all live in our own bubble, I guess, but the Royal Society is a prestigious bubble and they seem to have no inkling the damage done to their collective reputations by everything Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick uncovered, with copious help from the minions of the blogosphere. They will continue to take a hit on this - increasingly, as more people read THSI and other accounts until they completely change tack. They need, as you say, to apologise.
Nurse strikes me as one of those guys who are very good in their little specialised domain but who have no real understanding of people and how to engage with them. I have had to deal with several such examples in my career. They seem well meaning and "nice" but are totally exasperating since during a discussion they fool you into thinking you are engaging, but then you only discover at the end when they come out with some totally off the wall comment that you are on totally different planets.
I do fear that Doug is correct - they are planning to ask for FOI exceptions to be written into the legislation - I hope he is wrong.
Alexander K
During my 10 years in Rotary we poured money into such things as WaterAid, Mary's Meals, PolioPlus,and practical projects like Shelter Box and other "boots on the ground" initiatives.
We ignored the "recognised" charities because we felt that, whether AGW or whatever, they had an agenda in which the people they were supposed to be helping came a very poor second to their political work and often to the quality of the transport (not to mention their CEO's salary and perks!)
There was a joke circulating a few years ago that in the bush you could tell who was coming by what thet were driving. If it was a beat-up old motor bike barely able to get there in one piece it was the Catholic priest. A middle-aged Land Rover was probably Oxfam; a split new Toyota Land Cruiser with all the accessories was HIV/AIDS.
Organisations like RSPB and WWF have gone down the same route. The birds and the animals come a poor second to the kudos of being able to hobnob with the great and the good. I've hobnobbed with the reasonably great and the very good; it's over-rated as an occupation unless you just want to feel good about yourself, which is not what charities are supposed to be about.
Regarding Sir Paul Nurse and Dr Phil Jones on Horizon:
The programme transcript can be found here. The transcript depicts the same perspective (scientists "bombarded" &c.) as is described in earlier posts; no mention of earlier obfuscation leading to additional requests.
The only crticism of Jones would seem to be this mild one:
Thanks Harold, happy to take your word for it. I was reading quite a lot into that one sentence! But I assume that Sir Paul has criticised CRU on this more fully elsewhere, based on what he said to me yesterday. He said earlier, on the way down the stairs, that he felt that his recent Guardian article was 'very well balanced' and was obviously stung by criticism of it by Steve M and others. Maybe it was there that the criticism of CRU lack of openness was stated more fully - like perhaps two sentences :)
What was clear to me was that Sir Paul felt that there had been some cost in criticising CRU. I said to him, "You feel caught between two sets of critics, don't you?" I said quite a lot of things, some of which I won't write down here! But that's the way I see the world. You rise to the top and you are pressed and misunderstood from all sides.
Our side is totally right, of course, that's the difference in this case :)
Nurse might be open-minded but he seems to me to use a tactic widely used in CAGW ideology, which is to accuse others of having your own failings/behaviour, for example trying to shut-up sceptics by labelling them deniers when it is not the sceptics who are denying historical climate changes.
Wrt Nurse I'm thinking specifically of "Such people don't seem to be listening, they seem to be driven by ideology", and also of course accusing others of being 'unnecessarily rude' after his Horizon appearance.
His acknowledgement that the CRU deliberately witheld information is at odds, as President of the RS, with his criticism of the then natural efforts to obtain that information under FoI. And although not an expert in a specific field he should be able to recognise when scientific method is being applied or not, or is being perverted. So I could see that under his leadership the RS could support FoI exemptions that would allow 'experts' to make pronouncements without scrutiny apart fom that of 'other experts' - in other words pal-review again but this time secure from FoI.
He could make the phrase Nullius in verba an internet joke.
It would be nice to hear from Sir Paul on here, but I don't suppose he does blogging. He also seems rather thin-skinned, but I guess he's not used to being challenged about anything.
I agree Sir Paul is a little thin-skinned. What I like about him is that he's passionate. That's what I liked about his defence of his Guardian article: "Have you read the whole thing?" (No!) "It was really well balanced, I challenge anyone to say otherwise." Written down that can just sound arrogant but I was there. He cares about science, he cares about getting it right, he's not just a placeholder, he can't just be bought off.
How can that possibly be squared with what we think he's got wrong? He's new to the job (as he said to me - and I think that was a mark of respect, that I might just have a point about one or two things) and the people seeking to defend the AGW position were well-prepared for his arrival. Situation bad, situation normal. Given the way Paul Nurse has already taken a position on CRU, FOI and AGW generally, what are the chances of deep change during his tenure? Tolstoy had an opinion on that:
Thanks greatly to Tim Ball on Climate Audit yesterday for that.
So it's asking a lot but I have more hope of Sir Paul than the last few incumbents at the RS put together. He could change his mind and thus bring change. A pretty strong statement. Remind me of it when it's all over :)
Paul Nurse is a disappointment, to say the least. He just doesn't seem to get it.
That made we wonder what he bought his mother for Mother's day (I assume you have it in the UK)
Why, you may ask. Well, I heard the joke about appropriate Mother's Day gifts and that some insensitive sods actually give their mothers such wonderful things as Hoovers, "The Gift that Keeps on Sucking!"
Now, why did I ever think PN would give his mother such a thing? Seems in character.
The meeting was about Open Science wasn't it? The fact that that "Openess" implies the opposite is clearer reading what Nurse has said up to now.
I wonder what article he is referring to? Looking at the Guardian archive I can't see a recent article authored by him (just a letter on a non-FOI subject). However I do see two recent articles by Alok Jha titled:
Freedom of information laws are used to harass scientists, says Nobel laureate
Science Weekly Podcast: Climate science, transparency and harassment
Key words italicised by me there ;)
Also Key quote:
Not sure how that was balanced in the rest of the articles?
The cute usage of transparency and openess shouldn't blind people to the fact he is adopting a negotiating stance for his herd - identified as scientists - for less transparency and less openess.
I don't get this "new to something" argument. He is taking a very firm and authoratitive stance on harrassment yet he can't show he has made a real case with quantifiable evidence. He prefers to use the appeal to emotion and it seems to word when he gets described as "passionate". I don't like passionate people as a rule myself (that's just me) I think Nurse is just full of the avuncular bloviating we see more often from "popular" scientists, I could maybe accept this when he is on TV but not when he is negotiating laws the rest of us have to follow.
Thanks TLitB. I'm sure the Devil is gonna appreciate me for my contined advocacy on his behalf.
I have grave misgivings about Freedom of Information legislation generally and about relying on it in the case of climate science in particular.
That's not to say that I thought Douglas Keenan was wrong in what he said about this publicly on Wednesday. I thought what Doug said was brilliant. "It's quite true that climate researchers claim that they were bombarded by FoI requests. It's just not true that they were bombarded by FoI requests." It took a certain kind of person to say that in front of a substantial audience to the President of the Royal Society, who's just used the phrase. Doug crisply gave the backstory of the so-called bombardment of CRU by Climate Audit readers and he put the case completely fairly, in my view. It's absolutely pathetic the way this story has been recycled ad nauseam by the defenders of the AGW faith. Doug needed to be rude about this, it fully deserved, nay required, rudeness.
However, I also talked to Cameron Neylon at the tea and biscuits at the end of the two sessions. (In fact, did the tea ever arrive? That's a detail that escapes me.) You can't meet a finer and more insightful scientist than Cameron on what open science should really mean. It was a priviledge to get to know him a little last year. But he too was bothered by how much time and money FoI is taking up in the old Rutherford Appleton Labs. Two whole employees, that's £250k a year not going into science but into what feels to him and others like almost worthless bureaucracy, when money is so tight. But not totally worthless, because Cameron accepts that some kind of FoI is needed.
In response I told him the truth, that I wasn't the least bit surprised by Tony Blair repenting he'd ever had the idea, that on FoI he was an idiot (a sentiment that many could agree with in his memoirs but not necessarily in that context!) I always thought Blair and New Labour were idiots about such things. Thatcher would never have passed FoI. She was much too realistic about the nature of government in a democracy.
But the world's moved on from Thatcher. You can see that from the reaction of David Cameron and the Tories to criticism from the Archbish of Canterbury yesterday. That's also worth meditation but we don't have time for all that! (And the post-Web Internet reduces the cost of such things, that's very important too. Thank God for Tim Berners-Lee. As I say, we don't have time!)
Once FoI is law then of course it should be used, in support of what is right and good. Certainly the IPCC should have been far more open about its workings and I greatly appreciate people like David Holland using whatever means are at their disposal to prize open such things. But I'm not an FoI enthusiast, for the reasons Cameron gave (Neylon, not Dave). And I was also listening when Paul Nurse told me, rather forcibly, that receiving an FoI request felt threatening and intimidating to some mild-mannered scientists stuck away in their lab.
There are a few things to say about Nurse's stance here. One is that he is not the mild-mannered scientist. I like him for that. I'm a nobody, I accost him on the stairs as he tries to get out of the building, having been savaged or at least annoyed by Keenan, with a hundred other things to think about. But because he can tell that I care he fights back - because he cares too. Most people who have got to his level would have iced me. He didn't do that. As I've made clear, I like the guy.
Second, there is truth in what he says about the average, unworldly scientist receiving an FoI request. I know you're going to mock the idea and thus Nurse and myself but I believe that there's truth in this too.
BUT ... the rogues are hiding their sorry arses behind such truth. Nurse has been deceived. Geoffrey Boulton is not quite everything he seems.
You can fill in the rest.
Richard Drake:
"But when he emphasized to me that he'd only been in the job less than a year I felt that we should give him a little bit of leeway."
Would you extend the same leeway to the CEO of a company in which you had a significant investment?
Richard
"I have grave misgivings about Freedom of Information legislation generally"
Why? Surely the beauty of FoI is that the more open you are, the less likely it is to be invoked? Strange that the connection seemed not to register with a group ostensibly promoting openness.
As for DK's rudeness, while I'm sure Sir Paul isn't used to such a lack of deference, it was simply plain speaking. Given the runaround that Doug has had for so long from officials at every level, I thought he was pretty polite!
Jane, I like analogies from the commercial world as a rule. So let me fill this one out. If I was an investor in IBM when Louis Gerstner took over in 1993 then, because he had such a giant task to turn round the supertanker (to further mix metaphors) I would be prepared to give him a little slack, a little time, before deciding whether the direction he was taking was the right one.
There are however differences between Nurse and Gerstner and between the Royal Society and Big Blue. I just hope the transformation is as radical in both cases, in the end.
James:
Bureaucratic nightmare are the first words that spring to mind. The second thought is that it simply drives the really controversial conversations off the record, even more than before. On the second day of the Bilderberg Conference I think it's only right that we ackowledge that it is indeed important that confidential discussions can take place, why perhaps Denis Healey said that Bilderberg were the most helpful conferences he ever attended.
But there's another crucial pragmatic point to be made about FoI in the context of science and climate science. Like it or not, someone like Cameron Neylon, one of our greatest thinkers on open science (thanks Australia), is I think far from sure that he would oppose measures from the Royal Society aka the British governing classes to introduce special dispensations in FoI legislation to lighten the load of the humble toiler in the white coat. Doug Keenan summarised the 'plan' for the Boulton commission on open science well, in my view, and poor guys like Neylon are already being softened up by being told that there's much less money available to them for real science because of these FoI guys just flying desks (as they used to call it in the RAF).
We don't have to be FoI extremists to believe in openness in science, in reproduciblity and falsifiability. These are the foundation stones, as the man from Microsoft said, and he was right to say that so-called science has been moving away from them, through unverified and unverifiable software models, for one thing. That's the kind of thing we should hammer away on. FoI is only a tool - and if Doug is right, one that may soon be taken away from us.