Bishop Hill Crossroads
Apr 2, 2014 Climate: Parliament Royal Society I've gone on record in the past as saying that the Royal Society is little more than a political campaigning body, a criticism that I understand has not gone down too well at Carlton House Gardens. I was therefore interested to see the SciTech Committee's reminder that the Royal benefits from considerable quantities of public funding, and a suggestion that it might like to pull its weight on the public relations front (although Sir Paul Nurse's considerable campaigning efforts are noted approvingly):
89. The Royal Society receives the majority of its funding, £47.1 million a year, from the Government. Block 2 of its delivery plan up to 2015 is for Science Communication and Education but, of the £515,000 a year allocated to science communication since 2011, very little appears to have been spent on communicating on climate science. The public profile the Society has on this issue is due to the ongoing debate about climate science taking place directly between Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, and Lord Lawson from the Global Warming Policy foundation. This debate has been widely reported in the press.
90. Sir Paul Nurse has very publicly engaged with prominent climate sceptics in the past. But the same is not true of the Royal Society as a whole. The launch of its joint report with the US National Academy of Sciences could have been used better to promote and communicate accurately the most up-to-date science to a non-specialist audience.
Faust sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly pleasures and unlimited knowledge. Robert Johnson parted with his soul at the crossroads at Clarksdale Mississippi in return for mastery of his guitar. The reward for the Royal Society, meanwhile, was a steady stream of future government funding. However, like those that went before, the great minds at the Royal have discovered that the price really does have to be paid. The government machine wants action and the Fellows have little choice but to jump.
Reader Comments (55)
It is called the "Royal" Society because it was set up by Royalists to support the Royalist establishment against the parliamentarians after the English Civil war. A war when the new pseudo-industrialism of the model army soundly beat the Royalists. The Royal Society has no reason to like industrialists or parliamentarians.
So the Royal Society is just another Quango. When did their government funding start - 1660 - or is this more recent?
"Sir Paul Nurse has very publicly engaged with prominent climate sceptics in the past."
Presumably they are referring to Sir Paul's snide comments he has made whilst making presentations. He has not engaged in public debates nor have any of his esteemed fellows. Clearly they are too cowardly to do so.
If the Royal Society was worth the public money that is thrown at it, we would expect a lot of public debate - after all the science is "settled!" (well they keep telling us). But we never get any as since it would demonstrate to the public what little they get for their money..
Well there it is. Why wonder when they spell it out.
I am eager to see the lower TV (BBC) screen ticker when Lawson (or other middle earthers?) are on interview. Warning: this could be common sense...don't listen. Or some other obnoxious BS.
I saw the multi buck figure given to the RS too. Nothing like a Gov funded Luvvie club is there? And they don't like a threat of loosing it, may have to work for a living like the rest of us. Arrest me then !
Well, that's debatable Mike.
Antecedents of the RS appear to have been relatively apolitical. Activities were disrupted during the civil war and temporarily suspended during Cromwell's Commonwealth but thereafter resumed and granted royal charter by Charles II.
Most of the notable illustrious members came from dissenting religions and in that sense were vaguely anti-establishment, if anything. Historically, the society was dominated by Whigs, not Tories.
To say "it was set up by Royalists to support the Royalist establishment against the parliamentarians after the English Civil war" is a bit of a stretch.
DECC, Walport, the RS, the Met Office, the IOP, and many other bodies all bang the drum about climate science whilst avoiding the obvious huge discrepancies between some of the assumptions and reality and most of the model predictions and reality.
Out of that lot, one would have hoped that at least the RS would have the integrity to put observation before flawed assumptions and output. However, the RS and its leader have fully supported the "science is settled" bandwagon.
The emperor has no clothes and the RS has no wish to question the policies of its paymaster.
How nice to see that photo of Robert Johnson. The photo appears on the box containing his collected works. Legend has it that he showed up for the recording session and was not seen again. If you find the old Delta Blues interesting and you listen to Johnson's work, you will understand why he is legendary.
Nice to see a picture of Robert Johnson here of all places. This track was later covered by Cream. Always preferred the original acoustic version myself.
Anybody watched the new Cosmos' Episode 3 with Newton and Brooke? It seems the shenanigans have gone on far longer than Nurse, and the joke has been on us for several centuries.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
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 scientifictechnological elite.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, with amazing prescience, 1961
LevelGaze. Everyone who seems to be notable in the society was a Royalist:
Founded 1660 the year the Monarchy was again thrust on the English, the First president: Lord Brouncker was an ardent Royalist, the first Curator: Hooke was an ardent Royalist and as Wikipedia says:
"at the second meeting, Sir Robert Moray announced that the King approved of the gatherings, and a Royal Charter was signed on 15 July 1662 which created the "Royal Society of London" and as Wikipedia says: "This initial royal favour has continued, and since then every monarch has been the patron of the Society."
As for Moray:
"After Richelieu died on 4 December 1642, Moray took news of his death to Charles I in Oxford. He was knighted by Charles I on 10 January 1643, who sent him back to France. ... [after] Charles I had lost the battle of Marston Moor and surrendered himself to the Scots at Newark. Moray joined Charles I and the Scottish army in Newcastle in 1646, where, serving as his secretary (and secret agent of the Duke of Hamilton), he tried to persuade the King to escape, disguised as a woman.
I seem to be the solitary dissenter on this thread, a novel experience for me.
Neil, what Eisenhower said is only partly true. Arguably, one of the most profound changes in the past 30-40 years is the advent of the PC, pioneered by young oddballs in their parents garages. Had that not happened, computer development might indeed have rested with government finance, control and secrecy.
Consider the influence of the PC on today's asymmetrical global warfare. Much greater, for example than that of small, portable, high frequency radios so important in clandestine activities during WW2 and the few following decades. Marconi worked independently!
Of course I'm not at all disputing the great advances in electronics and engineering within government agencies these days, I'm just trying to put a bit of perspective here.
All the history going to show - including a less than stellar record on eugenics - that our hard-won freedoms didn't come from here. Even so, I wouldn't have minded being there for Arthur Eddington's presentation, on 6th November 1919, of the results of his observations from the island of Príncipe, during an eclipse, that confirmed a key prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Mixture of good and bad, in other words. And the current generation, like every other, has the chance to tip the balance one way or the other. We know that there are some honest Fellows who have already done their best.
omnologos:
I've mentioned Babbage's <cite>Reflections on the Decline of Science in England</cite> before. I doubt the Royal Society has ever been in a pure state of innocence untouched by game-playing, though that's not to say that it hasn't been better at some times than others. There's also an element of damned-if-you-do here. We know what a quangoised Roy. Soc. in a world of professionalised science looks like, but being a mostly independent body in a time of scientific amateurism has its own snares. IIRC in the "good old days" before professionalism it used to be quite easy to snag an FRS if you were someone with valuable prestige and money to give, to the extent that by the 1820s (according to Babbage) the Society was in danger of becoming a glorified golf club.
anonym: Snap. Swings and roundabouts. Who's going to step forward and 'clean house' on this occasion?
Mike-
Hardly surprising that some early members were royalists (the country was pretty well split 50/50 at the time).
But the fact remains that historically the society was dominated by those with a "whiggish" leaning, and were, emotionally, supporters of a constitutional monarchy with parliamentary overall power, if they thought much about it at all, certainly not the divine right of kings.
@Neil McEvoy - Dwight D. Eisenhower, with amazing prescience, 1961
Prescient indeed, Neil. But it only goes to show that history IS repeated and with the same - sometimes tragic - consequences.
With the Lunatics in charge of the asylum, as is the case with climate change, the future does not look too rosy!
How does the RS manage to spend nearly 129,000 quid a day, every day of the week?
LevelGaze: Very well said. Tim Berners-Lee one can take either way. A small businessman making his way in software contracting - as he emphasized, in effect, the one time we met - or recipient of the largesse of CERN, one of the most important examples of Big Science anywhere on the globe. (The Web was developed when Tim was on contract at CERN from around 1989. It's much to his bosses credit that they let him do something so 'green field'.)
Nothing like a blatant threat, is there? Toe the line, boys, or else.
The report is quite critical of the RS:
"The Government and other bodies, such as the Royal Society and the Met Office, are currently failing to make effective use of internet or social media to engage with the public and to become an authoritative source of accurate scientific information about climate change."
"88. The written submission from the Royal Society was not as extensive as we expected"
"Professor John Pethica, speaking on behalf of the Royal Society, agreed that, as a body in receipt of public funds, it had an obligation to communicate to the public about climate science. We found it difficult to establish evidence of this activity"
"91. The Royal Society is a publicly funded body with a responsibility to communicate about science. We encourage it to step up to that responsibility"
More political campaigning please!
I was funded by the Royal Society in 1998 to travel to NZ as a Visting Fellow. Minimal requirements from the RS - essentially gave me a stipend in response to a two page application and left me to it. So don't assume that all the money is wasted (or indeed controlled by agendas). It gave me a valuable career opportunity.
That said it is clear that over climate change the Society as a whole does not reflect the memberships views. I have colleagues who dissent from the 'consensus' but tend to keep quiet rather than battle the endless streams of hype, exaggeration and mis-information.
Theo, Univerisity of Virginia has a collection of Robert Johnson stuff, with a number of audio attachments, that you might find interesting here.
I see the Grauniad still can''t afford a sub-editor:
"Robert Johnson sells his souls to the devil"
WRT the RS, isn't it their job to tell the government how things really are? Or is their funding contingent upon their saying what HMG wants to hear?
LevelGaze, the evidence that the Royal Society was set up and run by Royalist upon the "restoration" of the class-ridden "Royal society" of Charles II is quite unequivocal. And even today we see the same basic set up up ... another Charles (III) and the "Royal" society in cahoots looking down their noses at the rest of society and attacking any of us "plebs" who dare to think we have anything worth saying.
Turbo: I'm sure there's much that's positive. And in seeking to 'battle the endless streams of hype, exaggeration and mis-information' I'm sure it's hard to know where to begin. All the best, and to all who sail in the venerable lady.
Mike Haseler: The stuff about the royalist origins is fascinating and convincing, thanks. But Charlie the third is, with the best will in the world, a different thing from his predecessors. Constitutional arrangements have moved on. What hasn't is the desire of unaccountable elites to have increasing power. I'm sure we're in violent agreement on that.
In less than 18 months time I believe that the Fellows will be electing a new President to replace Nurse - unless they've sold out their voting rights to the government in exchange for the money.
It will be interesting to see if they appoint someone with an open scientific mind, or yet another 'yes man' to whatever current government / pressure group policy dictates.
mikemUK
If you recall, the RS presidential voting paper has only one name on it, pre-selected by the council, and you can vote to approve it, or cross it out and suggest someone else. That's your lot.
See the GWPF Nullius in Verba by the Bishop. pp.19-20
Mikehaseler,
You are wrong about the origins of the Royal Society. The founding members had been on both sides in the Civil War. The chairman od the first meeting was John Wilkins, who was a Cromwellian appointment to replace a Royalist at Oxford. He was married to Cromwell's sister and lost his Oxford job at the restoration. Other founding members included Cromwell's personal physician. Most of the scientists had had Parliamentarian sympathies. Most of the gentleman amateurs who also made up the founders had had Royalist sympathies. See the paper here http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/sir-robert-moray-soldier-scientist-spy-freemason-and-founder-of-the-royal
mikep: The speaker wanting the emphasize the influence of Scottish rite freemasonry rather than the inferior London version. The quote from RS founder Christopher Wren about London's advantages due to astrological considerations is also a bit of a blow for the those looking for 'pure science' from the start. Thanks very much for the link.
That was my thought. But it's not yet clear to me exactly what really was wanted. Perhaps we're about to find out, and Nursey is going to take the gloves off and really start bashing the Bishop...
michael: Or, like Fiona Fox seems to have done (see the comments by Pharos and Paul Matthews), Nurse may rebel against such high-handed and heavy-handed pressure. Indeed, the rather naked attempts from consensus central to radicalise everyone remotely involved to insist on exclusion of sceptics from the debate isn't working - in Fox's case or in the case of the BBC and Channel 4, given their excellent use of Judy Curry, Nigel Lawson and Bjorn Lomborg recently. I'm going long on popcorn.
Richard ... I agree Charles is ... well I can't say different from his predecessors because wasn't one mad? Irrelevant is perhaps a better way to say it.
The reason this is important, is because it explains how the Royal Society became such an anti-industry, anti-engineer, anti-CO2 and thence anti-skeptic association.
It starts with its founding as a pro-Royalty/anti-parliamentarian association after the defeat of the Royalists by the early industry that supported and armed the parliamentarians. So it starts as an anti-industry society.
Then as industry thrived, the Royal Society had to bite its tongue and gradually evolved into an "anti-industry" gentleman's club ... what we might now call a "spin doctor" whose purpose was to recast the history of British industrial success as being due to the "gentlemen" of "scientists" and to downplay the industrialists (them up north) and generally suggest they/we were ignorant and uncouth.
This goes a long way to explaining the prevailing and quite horrendous anti-north attitude in the "establishment" . This "north-south" divide has been a current running through our society ever since. (Note neither of the "elite" universities of Oxbridge or Cambridge are "northern" -- but a huge number of MPs go through this "southern" indoctrination at Oxbridge).
This I think is why this anti-industry attitude, unlike most other countries in the world, is so pervasive in the UK and why it has permeated into every part of academia and the media and particularly the BBC.
Skipping a few world wars, finally, this anti-industry anti-"northerner" attitude reached its zenith with Thatcher who made her name from kicking & destroying UK industry. Then the Berlin wall falls, all the anti-capitalists are left without a cause. They morph into anti-globalists & anti-industry. Because industry uses a lot of energy and so produces a lot of CO2 this provides a way to unify the Thatcherite right, the anti-globalist left and those like the Royal Society against UK industry through the proxy of being "anti-CO2".
And finally this Royal Society's vendetta against industry and their naked "academic classism" surfaces yet again in the form of its hostility to us "skeptics" - people who are far more qualified than e.g. Nurse to speak on global warming, who support and agree with all the basic science, but who they feel they can insult and denigrate.
@Es-expat Colin Re :warning ticker
Yes that would be a good skeptic device that popsup on your screen, eg. when Flannery appears a bubble pops up with his past predictions
- but that is what I essentially do when I rarely watch TV
e.g. You can't watch Countryfile - without having an eye on the Twitter, so to see a farmer say "What Craven just said is complete BS"
.. and you look at BH first before you look at BBC news to know what they got wrong.
- whats's the point of you guys going in about Royalists, when globally we waste $1bn/day, hurt the environment and destroy the economy , and kick the scientific method in the dustbin thru this green lunacy ?
.. Every single day earlier that we end it, the better it will be for humanity.
In my opinion, Robert Hooke was on of, if not the greatest servant of the RS and
would be much better known had it not been for Isaac Newton,
His (Robert Hooke) contribution to scientific and technological advancement is
unsurpassed to this day. (in my opinion).
The Royal Society’s ‘motto-morphosis’ - Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/3357
Nullis in Verba replaced by "De verbo autem quod gubernatio"
" I have colleagues who dissent from the 'consensus' but tend to keep quiet rather than battle the endless streams of hype, exaggeration and mis-information."
Well then shame on them. They are in a position to actually make a difference but prefer to sit and do nothing in exchange for an easy life. Shame on them.
LevelGaze: I have never took Eisenhower's speech to mean anything other than the government forking out huge sums of money on research projects will eventually lead to the researchers producing what the government asks them to produce, which he regarded as dangerous - which it probably is, but also a complete and utter waste of money.
As you say PCs were invented in garages, and the Internet was developed with government money, but largely for the use of the US Defense Department who funded the original DArpanet project, that moved because the scientists and engineers didn't try to make their data standards international. A bit like the garage thing researchers who wanted to use Arpanet as it was then known were more interested in distributed databases and file transfer than whether the transport level protocol TCP/IP was an approved standard from the CCITT, so technologies were tried and improved upon without the interference of government bureaucracies.
Richard, I have often wondered what Tim Berners-Lee invented . In 1983 I had been working on local area networks and their uses for about a year when my Head of Division called me to his office, naturally I was concerned I'd none something wrong instead of which it went like this:
HoD. "Alan (Sir Alan Rudge) has asked us to fund some basic research because the company is committed to spending some money each year (can't remember the amount) so he's asked me to find some projects to fund."
I sat across from him wondering why he'd chosen the dumbest engineer in his division to share this with, but tried to nod meaningfully like the brighter guys did.
He went on. "Can you come up with something for us?"
I said. "Me?"
He said. "Why not."
I could hardly tell him that he'd chosen the dumbest engineer in the division and it was a big mistake. So I said: "You want me to invent something?"
"Well we are the effing research department." He said genially.
"When do you want it?" I asked.
"Alan would like something within a week, or so."
So I went back to my desk wondering WTF am I going to do?
I had recently been working on a joint industry/academia project partly government funded, looking into connecting satellites and local area networks, and, of course I worked for a telephone company, so I decided that I'd "invent" a new telephone service which allowed one to pick up the phone and speak to the network rather than dial a number. So a quick design of the network left me with all the applications sitting off a data network which merely carried the data. Then I thought we could send anything across this network, data, video, voice anything. So I produced a one and a half page paper for my HoD telling him I'd fund some work at Cambridge University ( I knew Roger Needham the head of the computer labs) to investigate the viability of such a network (I'd calculated that we'd need at least 2Gbit devices for video when they weren't available above around 560Mbit, so it was all a bit theoretical). I duly proposed to Roger that he get some people to do their PhDs on this topic, he accepted and we found three.
The point of this story is, I really was the dumbest engineer in the division, but I knew enough about the way networking was going in 1983 to map out a project which was effectively the internet. I have never had an original thought in my life, what I did was borrowed from what I knew other people were doing elsewhere. (Actually not "borrowed", stole). So I am pleased Sir Tim got the credit for inventing the internet, but he was really standing on the shoulders of giants. And one pigmy.
Mike
I don't know why you keep insisting that the Royal Society was a Royalist organisation. Try this short article on John Wilkins http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/wilkins/wilkins.html
Does he sound like a Royalist toyou?
pesadia
Yes Hooke's reputation suffered greatly at the hands of Newton, and he wasn't alone I seem to remember.
Stonyground
I was going to write something similar, but you did it better. +1 (at least)
The internet protocols were the real breaker of walls.
I always thought it interesting how, in the late 80's, OSI networking - a huge bureaucratic program to develop universal networking - was, almost overnight, swept away by the tsunami of TCP/IP networking. OSI's developers, who held TCP/IP in contempt as being little more than the work of some student hackers, could only ask in bewilderment "what happened...?".
The PC was inevitable once the Intel 8008 microprocessor had gone in sale in the early 70's. If Bill Gates had never been invented, we'd be running Unix today but probably on Intel hardware.
Martin A: Not sure about the last sentence re Unix. Unix was also looked down on by the old behemoths like IBM and Dec - even though Dec delivered many boxes to run Unix, Ken Olson always considered the PDP operating system and VMS the 'real thing'. Microsoft, which poached the designer of VMS from Dec, turns out to be the last big outfit with the same attitude. Apple made the move to Unix when they took Steve Jobs back in 1997 - if slowly. Before that a blinkered software culture would not have produced a PC with Unix, IMHO.
So Unix is in very much the same boat at TCP/IP for me. Also looked down upon by the cognoscenti were languages with dynamic typing, like Lisp and Smalltalk. But since the open source and open standards revolution, powered by Unix, TCP/IP and Berners-Lee's http, html and url, the world's programmers have chosen dynamic typing to a far larger degree, in the form of Perl, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, R, Objective-C and now CoffeeScript and Clojure. There are some high powered counter-attacks by the strong typists, it's fair to add, which just go to improve the game for everyone. But freedom and competition is as always proving a major spur.
Big Science has a profound place in the world; but so does the 12 year old kid I saw last night at the Victoria Maker Space who was putting the finishing touches on his open source, made it himself, 3D printer.
One of the effects of the computer/internet revolution is that 12 year old kids have the information and the tools which, 50 years ago, you needed a university research library and an electronics lab to access. And access to both meant you had to be enrolled in an electronic engineering program and therefor enmeshed in the Academy. No longer is this the case and that leads to a progressive discounting of outfits which are primarily academic institutions.
In a quite profound way the pillars of access, peer review and tenure are all being shaken by distributed knowledge.
Robert Hooke was the Curator of Experiments for the Royal Society; but he was also very much a tinkerer. Imagine what he would have done with a $200 3D printer.
Mike Haseler posted
> It starts with its founding as a pro-Royalty/anti-parliamentarian association after the defeat of the Royalists by the
> early industry that supported and armed the parliamentarians. So it starts as an anti-industry society.
This is entirely incorrect. Its origins PREDATE the restoration. It started as the Gresham College group in 1645. In 1648 it combined with the Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club. It was far from an establishment organization starting the tradition of holding lectures and debates that were open to the public. Its members included those with both Royalist and Parliamentary sympathies and as for being anti-industry there was no large scale organised industry at that time outside those run by the state such as the Royal Gunpowder Mills, Royal Ordnance and the shipyards of the Royal Navy.
Those organizations were starved of money prior to the civil war (by Parliament). The Roundheads were NOT supporters of industry, most of their supporters were small to middling farmers and merchants. Oliver Cromwell was a farmer and local landowner in Cambridgeshire who suppressed the levellers ruthlessly. I suspect he had far more in common with Margaret Thatcher than Arthur Scargill.
As industrialization advanced it did not become anti-industry it simply became irrelevant. The real intellectual power house of the late 18th and early 19th century was the Lunar Society of Birmingham which was very definitely pro industry. It was Humphry Davy who got it back on track in the 1820's an he was FAR from being anti-industry. His most famous invention was the Davy Lamp specifically intended to let coal miners work in gaseous conditions.
Keith
This kind of thinly veiled threat might well backfire. If the RS finds its backbone, the Government may well see the truth in the adage "be careful what you wish for".
Social change is never smooth or coherent, so it's no surprise that the The Royal Society, which evolved as a product of the Establishment, or that the Society is funded generously by said Establishment, as the very raison d'etre of it is to promote the largely imaginary superior and enlightened aspects of the Establishment which may be, in this day and age, no more than an anachronistic remnant of a bygone age.
In a culture which is struggling to cope with and make coherent sense of the almost-limitless breadth and depth of it's contained knowledge and abilities, perhaps the notion of a body such as the Royal Society is so outmoded that is actually in the process of deconstructing itself.
Engaging "sceptics" is a priority because...? Strange world of "science".