Paul Nurse has written to the Times to try to defend the idea that the Royal Society speaks with a united voice on global warming.
Sir, It is possible to think from the letter of Michael Kelly, FRS, (Jan 29) that the Royal Society might not be fully supportive of the views of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser and the IPCC on the science of climate change. That would be wrong.
In 2010 the Royal Society produced a guide that set out what climate science was well established, where there was wide consensus but still debate and where there remains substantial uncertainty.
Michael Kelly was on the working group which wrote that report, which came to similar conclusions to those of the IPCC. Informed by that report, our Council, the representative body of our Fellowship, recognises that the evidence is increasingly clear that there is increased warming of the Earth, due to human activity.
There are uncertainties about predicting the exact future impact of such changes, but the Royal Society’s and IPCC’s evidence-based and scientific approach gives us the best possible insight into what may lie ahead and should be the basis for discussing the policy decisions related to this issue.
The debate on climate change is too often characterised by those at the extremes — those who refuse to accept the evidence and those who seek to overstate it.
For a productive debate to take place we need to look at the most reliable evidence as presented by the majority of expert climate scientists. The Royal Society and the IPCC reports are a good place to start.
Sir Paul Nurse
President of the Royal Society
This is rather funny. On Tuesday we had prominent climatologists telling MPs that the IPCC's computer models do not include the IPCC's latest estimates of aerosol forcing. This necessarily means that they run too hot. These models form the basis of both the attribution of recent warming to man and predictions of future climate change.
In what strange world are the IPCC reports "a good place to start"?