Canada's Financial Post has taken a look at the Royal Society, and in particular some of the strange epistles written by Paul Nurse to Nigel Lawson and the even stranger award of a research fellowship to Stephan Lewandowsky. Writing on the opinion pages, Peter Foster seems barely able to believe what is going on:
The Royal Society, the U.K.’s once-venerable academy of science, has arguably lost its collective mind over the theory of projected catastrophic man-made global warming. Recently, its president, Paul Nurse, in seeking to avoid a meeting with skeptical experts from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, GWPF — the think tank set up by former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Nigel Lawson — linked skeptics with those who reject evolution and believe that the weather might be changed by prayer. Whatever kind of argument that is, it isn’t scientific, but it certainly invites analysis of the mindset that made it.
Foster might well have added the appointment of Paul Erlich as an overseas fellow, which I believe is essentially in the gift of the President. It all adds up to a pretty sad state of affairs.