Suddenly the reactions to my Nullius in Verba report on the Royal Sociey are coming thick and fast. Bernie Lewin has written a long blog post, the first of two on the report.
Montford’s sparse and unembellished chronicling of the relaxation of this discipline is what makes it such a powerful work. Montford does not pretend to chronicle the perversion of science itself, as Richard Lindzen suggests in the Foreword – he does that elsewhere, and daily, on his blog. Nonetheless, his story of the perversion of the Royal Society is an emblem, a sign or an indicator of this general perversion, wherein, as Lindzen puts it, the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority. Montford’s is a story no less of how a leading institution of the scientific revolution—the sober, reasonable, disinterested, oh-so-Anglican model for the European Enlightenment—after preserving its integrity for so long, has only recently, and grossly, perverted itself with the promotion of one opinion in particular, namely: the ‘consensus’ opinion on the ‘settled science’ behind the need for urgent action to mitigate a global climate catastrophe.