Monday
Nov122012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Mark Thompson on the GWPF
Nov 12, 2012 BBC Climate: other GWPF The former head of the BBC has given a lecture at Oxford about science and rhetoric and the problems of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
An extraordinary document. Read it here.
Reader Comments (76)
Sigh...
Mark Thompson
Mark Damazer
Chris Patten
Gus O’Donnell
if they're anything like :
The Blairs
Ruth Kelly
will almost certainly be taking guidance from
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor - one wonders what the august prelate is advising at the moment....
I'm not anti-Catholic - but there seems to be statistically more involved here than the UK's 1.5 million congregation proportionally represents - and it all seems pretty chummy.
I read the part about the MMR scandal and realised that Thompson did not seem to realise what debate was actually about.
Just because you give someone with an opposing view airtime, does not mean that you are necessarily being even-handed. If the counter arguments are strong enough, then in a debate there should be a clear winner. If the other party could not convince, despite having "right" and "the facts" on their side, then it is not the fault of the opposing view. In other words if you pitch Manchester United against Gillingham, it is not Gillingham's fault if their opposition scores six own goals.
He also fails to realise the damage done by Tony Blair's refusal to state whether his son had had the injection. I immediately drew the conclusion that young Leo had not been injected and that MMR was therefore dangerous. Before then, I considered the debate to be rather arcane and that it had just been the case of some children reacting badly to the vaccine.
I think also, that he fails to realise how rhetoric plays its part in BBC's own news programmes. I remember vividly a Radio 4 bulletin around 2001 that declared "proof" about global warming had just been published "because" it was based on computer models, not that it was based on real-world analysis or evidence. I remember having to drive to the station because it was so cold that day.
Thompson quotes Hume, but he fails to address the most important aspect of Hume's works: namely causation. A and B are two events: B happens immediately after A. But what evidence is there that A influenced B ? This is the whole AGW problem in a nutshell. The lack of evidence and the absence of a direct causal link: Arctic Ice melts, New Jersey is devastated by a Storm Sandy. Where is the evidence that either of these events are caused by AGW ?
I just want to make one O/T observation about the BBC. Many commentators have stated that if the BBC were in the private sector then many of the partial-competents that we see paraded in front of us ( the new chap Tim Davie is an excellent example, all the way down to his affected Mockney accent) would never get past tea-boy. I'm afraid that simply is not true. Companies today are littered with semi-competent middle managers, most of whom have very little idea how their business operates or how their company actually makes money. It is a disease so common in middle management that it is a wonder that the economies of the West function at all ( oh, hold on a second...) Part of it is down to accounting techniques, in other words cross-charging, which cause departments to compete with each other at the expense of pursuing external customers and internal "funny money" becomes an ersatz for real outside earnings. As a result departments become parisitic on the main company, until eventually the company disappears inside its own little black hole. With an organisation like the BBC, which mostly has a fixed income, this leads to empire-building, back-stabbing and a generally poisonous political atmosphere, producing managers that are so caked in the blood of their colleagues, that when they emerge blinking into the real world, they find that thaty cannot cope with the pressure ( Mr Entwistle).
'Well researched' and 'fact checked'. Obviously, this is how the 'journalists''at bbc's newsnight got their story correct.
They followed the mark thompson school of journalism. Don't let a fact get in the way of a good story.
Mark Thompson has a first in English, that is what qualifies him to be so forthright when it comes to scientific matters.
Mark Thompson:
"I back science because I find Popper’s account of the scientific method and its falsifiability intellectually compelling"
Could we ask Mr. Thompson to state where CAGW makes a falsifiable prediction?
This muddled, pretentious, self-aggrandizing wazzock obviously thinks he is much more intelligent than the general public. Most of that general public have too accurate an ear for BS to bother listening to him.
I draw your attention to exhibit marked M.T in your folder Lady's and Gentleman.
Every corrupt statement will eventually lead to the truth, keep em coming fools.
John Barrett. I think the MMR can easily be related to the global warming scare. It is irrelevent to the press what the truth is because they'll always give airtime to the doom mongers rather than those saying, "Hang on, it's not that bad." So be it with CAGW. Mark Thompson is a smidge on the arrogant side, and like all arrogant people ( I do hope Sir Paul Nurse gets this message) confuses intelligence with cleverness. They are traits in human beings that are totally unrelated. If' your intelligent and clever, you become Warren Buffet, if your intelligent and dumb you can become anything in life, even the President of the Royal Society, but you're still not clever.
My daughter had the MMR jabs twice, I never believed a word of the scaremongering put out by the BBC and others because I have a limited respect for the medical profession based on the fact that theirs is an empirical science ( notwithstanding the fact that it took them 20 years to get behind the fact a that ulcers were caused by bacteria). So when an intelligent idiot tells me that I would go to a cancer specialist if I had cancer he's right, because I'd be going to practioners, who through dogma and stupidity have killed many thousands of people to get to the knowledge they have now. Whereas climate science wasn't even a science 30 years ago and is infested by environmentalists who would die a thousand deaths if someone invented an energy source that didn't make people change their current lifestyles. They simply don't care.
As for his eulogising Rachel Carson I'm appalled, 40 million people have died unnecessarily from malaria because of the lies of this horrible woman. Every day 2000 children die of the disease which could be near eradicated by spraying their homes twice a year with DDT, and the environmental NGOs are still (secretly, now they've been found out) lobbying against its use.
Just like George Monbiot who is now grovelling for all he's worth in case Lord McAlpine sues his ass, they are trying to do good. Unfortunately it isn't for human beings it's for birds, who in any event won't be harmed by DDT.
Nice to see George grovelling to get off the hook, his arrogance is only exceeded by his vanity. If his lordship is short of a few bob to sue the great do-gooder I would cheerfully chip in.
Ahh...'The Limits to Growth'. I remember reading it the first time round, in 1972 (as a potential candidate for the the then new OU). It took me many years to grow mature enough to see the counter-arguments (in those days one didn't see the unforeseen consequences of banning DDT), but now I see that it was just a prequel to the hockey stick. That book, which I keep on my desk to remind me of disastrous group-think, was just a pre-cursor to today's AGW scare and the IPCC.
I always wonder if the obsessive fawning over scientists by media types is a form of penitence. One can imagine them as the ones who tortured and teased nerds at school. Just as their limited skill at maths and science led them to isolate clever kids, the same lack of technical ability drives them to idolise those they now recognise as mentally superior. Clever = scientist in their limited imaginations.
Unlike them, we know that the smartest kid in the class isn’t always the smartest kid. We know the scientists in the company aren’t unusually the lynchpin of the organisation. We also know that highly technical people can be exceptionally focused on their speciality and can often be very ignorant in other areas.
As for the MMR point – funny how it took a journalist to finally bring Wakefield’s shoddy methods to book. It wasn’t science or the Lancet that nailed him. The original, flawed paper was only withdrawn after Wakefield was finally struck off in 2010, over 10 years after the thing was peer reviewed and published. Brian Deer only got the dirt on Wakefield because Wakefield tried to sue Deer and had to give up documents during disclosure. Even then, Wakefield wasn’t struck off for truly a truly execrable science paper but because he’d maltreated his patients. The twits at the BBC were probably first among those to reject the vaccine because it tied in with their hatred of big business.
By Plato’s orchides, there are days when I feel proud to be a humble commenter here. John Barrett on middle management, Roberto on the impossibility of risk-free reporting, John Shade on everything, and a dozen others here demonstrate a hold on the episteme and a rejection of the doxos which would make them worthy candidates to run the NYT or the BBC.
Any chance of FOI-ing the university to find out who attended, and then sending them this thread?
As I keep saying because these peoples intellect does not measure up to their egos and their intellect has failed them with CAGW the only option they have left is to let their ego take over and bingo you have a talk like this. Expect more and more ego based rhetoric.
The problem is that CAGW is being used for multiple reasons to control your life, 1 example of useful idiots being paid off just Google that failed PM Gordon Brown to see the well paid job he has now. Tin foil hat? The BBC would probably say yes and give me some powerful mind numbing, dribble inducing drug for my own good.
It would now appear that a number of influential journalists at the NYT are strongly opposed to having Mr Thompson as their new CEO. Based on what was allowed to happen at the BBC on his 8 year watch, he's cut from altogether the wrong cloth, in their view. Given who's piping up at the NYT, he may yet find himself out of his new job.
TinyCO2
Thompson explains the fawning when he cites the MORI poll on trust, an authority right up there with Hume and Popper, in his books.MORI shows that scientists and doctors are trusted by about 80% of the population, journalists and politicians by 10-15%. Trust in doctors survived the MMR saga, that GP who murdered 200 patients, and would probably have survived Mengele and Crippen. We’re not always very logical, we the great unwashed, faced with a lady with a clipboard asking daft questions.
Trust is something the scientists have got and the journalists and politicians want. By sucking up to them they hope some of that trust will rub off on them.
It seems to work both ways, with trust in scientists declining, the more they’re courted by politicians and journalists.
BTW...I do not trust my GP(s) and I developed that opinion within a few months of moving to Britain.
This is like paying tribute to the Godfather. Thomson is saying that he is prepared to debase and humiliate himself before the world by lying about global warming for his banking and fossil fuel masters.
Thompson is an example of a journalist who would like to be something more intellectual, but just hasn't got the intellect to make it.
Oh dear I read it now ...
It's bascially a hymn to scientism. From a technocratic suit to the dream of a technocratic future.
Thompson opens by picking through Peisers straightforward statement like a watchmaker using the only skills he clearly has ( Eng Lit? ) and then claims to point out deception in all the parts “Look there! and there!” he cries in triumph. He basically shows he can’t understand Peiser but he can’t admit this. So he tries to shows Peiser is merely using wilful deception - Thompson does this by a passive aggressive demonstration of his knowledge of "rhetorical trope[s]… …defined thousands of years ago".
Thompson basically deploys a 'balanced' method of ad-hominem that only years at the BBC can train you for ;)
I don’t think Thompson is practicing wilful deception; he is just evolved that way.
The rest is standard by the numbers drivel - it doesn't really have the oomph as anything memorable or new. He has no clue about science but he likes the authority it promises is all that comes across. The appeal to a post religious age of a new priesthood.
Thompsons proven self-deceptive ability and sophistry runs riot with some in-names sprinkled around casually to show he has his finger on the pulse– ooh Popper! Well done, Lee Smolin mmmmm not so sure ;)
I recognised quickly the dead hand of Dan Kahan early on before the explicit reference. Kahan is the “middle way” social scientist guy all these pseudo intellectual morons seem to be flocking to nowadays – grab Kahan while he’s hot guys if you think he can explain the lack of traction of climate alarmism. ;)
Kahan made easy:
Basically get a sober guy in a suit to persuade the conservatives about climate, and a hipster with an iPod to persuade the kids about GM, and bingo! A broad new sunlit upland of technocracy will be born with your new pliable subjects.
Target your audience with PR basically, but with a veneer of pseudo-science a la Lewandowsky (though Kahan isn’t as bad as Lewandowsky – who could be?)
Read Thompson's conclusion it is all there:
Basically Hey scientists! We humanities guys will be the bearers of your authority just lend it to us. Please, please…
The NYT deserve Thompson - he is a clichéd noise - well trained by years of sanctimonious posturing. I really hate scientism and its acolytes.
Geoff Chambers:
This reminded me of something Norman Tebbit wrote in an earlier, wide-ranging blog post on the BBC saga:
Not everything is the fault of the 'establishment'. Sometimes we need to look closer to home. Thanks for this penetrating insight on Thompson's piece.
The suffocating 'remarkable lack of curiosity' must run through the management echelons of the BBC from shop floor to DG. Has he not considered the political and NGO pressure of the environmentalist movement and the explosion of environmental quangos dictating academic environmental research? And the consequent explosion in climate related professorships in response to the hosing of public funded grant money? Was he curious enough to read anything critical at all? Did he read the emails? Did he read the HSI? Did he note Judith Curry's concerns? Well he did note the railing back of the Royal Societies rebuttals, but still regards the GWPF as devil incarnate for presenting an opposition case, probably because they have been so incisive.
Apologies for an over-used analogy, but it still seems so pertinent-
'But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise...Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.'
Eisenhower's Farewell Address 17 January 1961
It's Comte's Positivism. Have a look -
Thompson:
If you read the passage Thompson is citing, Pieser does nothing of the sort. Pieser acknowledges the potential problem of AGW, the opposite of what Thompson claims Pieser is saying.
But he doesn't. Pieser is simply saying that any policy responses will raise ethical and economical questions - in in other words, however you address AGW, it will have both costs and moral choices. Pieser's choice of "social commentators" isn't the best here, perhaps he was wary of saying "philosophers"; he could have added "voters".
Thompson doesn't like this response because it means people other than "scientists" getting involved. For Thompson, only "scientists" are qualified to make ethical and economic decisions. Others may get involved, but only if they subordinate their authority to the "scientists".
I have always found this a baffling argument. If a large meteorite was discovered and calculated to be on a course to strike earth, we would still have a wide range of moral and economic policy options before us. It would be strange if we handed all political and economic decisions to the man with the telescope who first detected the meteorite.
"Here you go, man with telescope. Tell us what to do."
Yet this is exactly the course Thompson says we must follow with AGW.
The Leopard has picked out the punchline - and it's the only option Thompson's argument leaves him, as a non-scientist: "Make me your mouthpiece".
For an "antidote" to Thompson's many appeals to the "authority" of "science", Tallbloke has a recent paper by Richard Lindzen. Roger's introduction:
Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?
Richard Lindzen 2012 www.euresisjournal.org
From the Abstract:
From the Introduction (Mark Thompson, please take note):
Prof Richard Lindzen: Fear based science
@ TLITB
You quoted: Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age, perhaps any age.
This is of course more of Thompson's arrant bullshit. The most formidable intellectual force of every age is its religion. Scientism is a religion.
The essence of fascism is that it makes you feel good about being part of the group, and contemptuous of those who aren't. There is nothing in Thompson's essay that any fascist could disagree with.
Peiser makes more sense than Thompson.
Peiser tells us we should balance what might become a future problem caused by AGW with what it would cost today to do something to avert this potential problem - and that this is a larger issue than simply one of "science".
Thompson argues that the AGW problem is real and imminent (not a possible future problem). His idea that the general public is not qualified to "verify" what "99% of physicists" tell them, and must therefore take it on "trust" is ludicrous, as any rational skeptic knows.
The name of the game (Reagan) is "trust but verify". Sorry 'bout that, Thompson - NO SALE.
Max
Some additional context for the lectures: http://politicsinspires.org/2012/11/mark-thompson-the-cloud-of-unknowing/
This is Orwellian Double Think at its overwhelming gray, stolid best. Thompson claims 'impartiality' in the face of '28gate'? He tirelessly juxtaposes the old faithfuls whilst at the same time endorsing the 'Ministry of We Know Best': "The dangers to health from smoking are so clearly established that it would be not impartial, but irresponsible to give a smoking enthusiast equal time with the Chief Medical Officer," and "In the BBC’s coverage of climate change that ‘triple betrayal’ according to Christopher Booker we have tried progressively to adjust the balance of the debate to reflect shifts in the underlying science and the developing findings of the IPCC and other scientific bodies over time." Yet again, the royal 'We' of the fabled Ministry of We Know Best makes its presence felt.
Finally, the BBC headline 'STEVEN HAWKING: GOD DID NOT CREATE UNIVERSE' (xxvi) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493 is a journalist written headline. Having acknowledged this, Thompson bizarrely suggests Hawking himself made the comments saying: 'Professor Hawking’s remarks about God seem to lie somewhere in the middle'.
Thompson ends by stating that: 'Science is the most formidable intellectual force of our age...'
having obviously not heard of one of the greatest travesty's of this age: 'postmodern science'.
I found this 'lecture' unconvincing, inconsistent and meandering. It was difficult to make out a clear sense purpose and as a lecture seekings to communicate cogently, coherently and compellingly, Thompson failed. His lecture auditorium will I predict with 97% certainty p,0.05, (95%CI: 91 - 99%) be filled with narcoleptic students.