Bishop Hill The edge of the academy
Jan 31, 2013 Climate: Sceptics Yesterday I had an interesting exchange of views with various members of staff at the University of Nottingham over the limits to academia. At what point does someone teeter on the brink between legitimate academic research and political activism?
I am uncomfortable with the idea of marketing as an academic specialism full stop. I seems to me to be hard to justify taxpayers having to cough up their hard earned cash so that academics can try to find ways of selling them things. Are we really happy with the man who sweeps the floor in the widget factory keeping middle-class boffins in this way?
However, there are situations that are worse still. Work aimed at changing other people's views on any particular issue is entirely illegimate. The particular case we discussed was that of Talking Climate, a website best known for its video extravaganza "How to Talk to a Climate Change Denier". Their website gives this information:
Talking Climate is a UK-based partnership between the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC), the Understanding Risk group at Cardiff University and the ‘Climate change as complex social issue’ research group at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, Nottingham University.
PIRC, is a climate activist group, run by familiar names such as Christian Hunt (of the Carbon Brief), Kirsty Schneeberger of UK Youth Climate Coalition, former Ralph Nader sidekick Charles Medawar, self-declared "climate advocate" Tim Helweg Larsen, and well-known climate academic-cum-activist Adam Corner. COIN is equally well known, and explains its job as trying to change attitudes and behaviour on climate change.
My Twitter conversation took in, among others, Brigitte Nerlich of Nottingham University. She had part-funding the Talking Climate Project out of her research money. She agreed with me that there was a difference between an academic's need to be policy-relevant and the situation in which they used their positions (and presumably public money) to advance particular points of view - a value-judgement.
This being the case seems to me that Prof Nerlich has a problem. She needs to convince us that when she was approached by these two patently activist organisations with a view to obtaining funding, she authorised the expenditure because she felt that together they would produce a website that was not seeking to advance a particular point of view. The chances of anyone being convinced by this are, to say the least, slim. I said I thought her actions represented a misuse of public funds. She protested, saying that she was non-political, a position I challenged, perhaps somewhat mischievously, by asking her to fund me as well. This is not, on the face of it, an unreasonable request, given that this site has become the venue for many important interactions between climate scientists and sceptics.
Unfortunately, that was the last we heard from Prof Nerlich.
I was then challenged by Adam Corner, who as well as being a board member of PIRC is an academic at Cardiff's school of pyschology. He is therefore central to the Talking Climate project. Corner's position was that Talking Climate is a "resource for research on climate change communication" (I urge readers to examine the site themselves to make up their own minds on this question) and that it actively sought engagement with sceptics. Here he cited a comment thread with Geoff Chambers., although I think Geoff visited the site to comment is hard to construe as Marshall et al "actively seeking engagement".
But that's besides the point. Corner's final take was, rather remarkably, that I was only objecting to Nerlich's funding it because I think climate is contentious. Presumably he thinks climate is uncontentious.
What though, did he mean by "climate"? I couldn't get much out of him on this, apart from "you think AGW is contentious". This of course is not true, since I repeatedly say that mankind affects the climate, not least through CO2 emissions. That much is not contentious - at least not for me.
But the global warming debate is, nevertheless contentious. Estimates of climate sensitivity in the IPCC's draft report vary from a "shrug your shoulders and think about something more important level" of 0.7°C to a distinctly alarming 11°C per doubling. So, no matter what Adam Corner says, the global warming debate is contentious - this is the official IPCC take on the subject. That he pretends it is not puts him in a very small minority and cannot obscure the fact that he and his colleagues are using public funds to advance their view of that debate.
And even if the IPCC gave a single estimate of 11°C based on the output of a single climate model? Would that justify taxes being taken from people who disagree? Do Nerlich and Corner even recognise the right of people to have different opinions? If they do, then how can they justify using public funds to pay people like George Marshall to publish his slime?
Reader Comments (112)
Chucky...you agree with me then. I would also, if I were a sceptic. But my bigger question is what is going to happen if it is all a scam!
Ed, government stands to make huge advances in the additional taxes and powers - bureaucracies and social controls - it will be able to impose. And government is the funder of climate science. See the problem? It's rather like drug or companies funding the science that says how good their products are good and safe - it's a monumental vested interest problem. Only thousands of times more serious than anything drug or tobacco companies might do.
And yes, more expensive and inconvenient power will make us poorer and less free - all the while fattening and expanding government. To the ears of totalitarians/socialiss, this is of course music - which is twhy for example the Labour Party and the BBC are so keen on pushing climate alarmism, they really don't care if the science is bogus or not, all they care about is that government gets an excuse to get bigger.
Thanks for answering the question.
Chucky
There is no left wing, there is no socialism, there isn't even a working class. It doesn't exist. There are only plebs, dole scroungers and chavs. We don't need the working classes now we have Poles.
Question put to me.
Who is your favourite socialist ?
Answer
Rupert Murdoch. If Murdoch wasn't a socialist, he wouldn't have bought the Labour Party, would he ?
Hi Bish - gentle nudge; it's been a week - has anything come to mind yet?
NBY
Not a lot to be frank. I need to do a post on this.
Thanks for being frank Bish. If I may be the same, I find it both surprising and worrying that you and Matt Ridley should make such strong statements as
"What though, did he mean by "climate"? I couldn't get much out of him on this, apart from "you think AGW is contentious". This of course is not true, since I repeatedly say that mankind affects the climate, not least through CO2 emissions. That much is not contentious - at least not for me."
yet when asked for the evidence in support of it there is nothing forthcoming. I'm of the opinion that climate science as a whole has a very poor track record in providing properly verifiable evidence in support of the central hypotheses that CO2 emissions are driving climate. IMO to continue to promote this notion without being able to support it with evidence inhibits rather advances the debate.
Ps - Steve Mc makes some relevant points here:
http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/too-much-hot-air-about-global-warming-says-researcher-rv-1
not banned yet
People who are sceptics blame poor science on the fact that they are in-bed with Governments, yet S. McIntyre was a mining executive...so surely the same could be said. Also not sure how much you can take from a small article!
Ed, the problem with your attempted ad hom is Steve made his money in gold mining, so it is a very long bow to see that as a conflict of interest. Without putting words into his mouth, I believe he is on record as seeing himself as an Obama supporter and being agnostic on whether the warming is human influenced.
His argument has been that the maths behind a lot of the claims is very dodgy, to say the least. As he is well aware of the requirements of mining prospectuses (or is the plural prospecti?), then he can be seen by a disinterested observer as commenting withing his area of expertise. This is a lot more than climate scientists can say about their statistics ability!
Maybe we just need a bit of consistency on who we can and cannot believe...I for one am confused! Or do we all in the end believe who we feel says what sits most comfortably with us! Gold mining is causing a lot of social and environmental problems where I live...but that is another debate! Not that this discredits the author is anyway...just a fact of the mining industry.
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