Bishop Hill Crusher Nurse fails to squeeze
Sep 4, 2014 GWPF Royal Society A retweet into my Twitter feed points me to an article in the Guardian. Paul Nurse it says, is wants people to "call out serial offenders who are using misinformation on science issues". The article is here.
Nurse is calling for malefactors to be "crushed and buried", which sounds as though he has been reading too much of the Marxist literature he apparently favoured at one time, or perhaps indicating too many hours spent in front of Game of Thrones. Amusingly though he doesn't seem to want to call out and crush any such bad people himself, nor even it seems to give them a gentle squeeze:
We have to be aware of, and beware, organisations that masquerade as lobbying groups, which we see a lot in climate change. We have to be aware of politicians that cherry pick scientific views, even ministers who listen to scientists when it's about GM crops and then ignore them when it's about climate change,
We know who he means of course, because he has made such allegations against Nigel Lawson in the past. On that occasion, Nurse got himself into a bit of a pickle, unable to defend himself from Lawson's accusation that he was lying. Eighteen months later, he is reduced to repeating the general allegation, still without any specific details of the offence, but this time minus the name as well.
You have to laugh.
Bishop Hill
The Mail's coverage includes this from Benny Peiser:
Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, accused Sir Paul of using 'the language of extremism'.
'If he can't live with critics and sceptics that is too bad. But there is no need to use this kind of violent and aggressive vocabulary.
'Scepticism used to be a sign of science itself. When scientists cannot cope with that, and instead use this language of extremism, it is a sign of desperation, a sign they are losing the plot.'
Reader Comments (58)
Smiffy
Your political bias is showing again! This time with added paranoia by the look of it :-)
You don't have to like Lawson but as an ex-Chancellor his views on policy (which is what the GWPF is about) are probably more cogent and coherent than yours or mine and certainly more so than Paul Nurse's.
Benny Peiser has it right. Nurse is so incensed that anyone should be challenging anything to do with global warming (a subject on which his opinions are no more valid than yours or mine) that he can't even behave in the civilised manner that one would hope befits a President of the Royal Society.
I smell panic.
Nurse is not a stain on the RS. Nurse is the norm in the RS. From Newton's petty revenges to Lord Kelvin declaring radio as without a future, passing through the shameful repeated attempts at depriving Harrison of his Longitude award, ending up with the total politicisation of our damned age of stupid times, the RS has never been anywhere near what its legend suggested.
Little wonder Darwin decided to keep things for himself for a long time and did not publish his evolution revolution on any RS paper.
I wonder if the Nurse outburst is part of a coordinated strategic maneuver with transAtlantic connections?
The Mail's highlighted box in which "GWPF DONORS ARE UNMASKED" credits outing the "two 'secret' donors who have supported the foundation" to www.Desmog.uk which sprang, coincidently, into being this Monday.
Editor of Desmog.uk Brendan Montague is , coincidently, owner of media consultancy Montague Media Ltd. and a "non-profit" which does work for NGOs and charities......and, coincidently, an "independent" investigative journalist as well. No conflict there, obviously.
Desmog.uk is shown as linked to desmog.com, the US arm run by ex EPA official, Brendan Demelle. http://www.desmogblog.com/bio/brendan-demelle
The founding Desmog was co-created by the Vancouver PR firm James Hoggan Associates, with financing from multimillionaire John Lefebvre, whose fortune came from laundering illegal internet gambling money to which he plead guilty in a plea bargain in 2007.
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=07c327e5-3aa6-4794-b600-617b347ade24
In addition to chairing the David Suzuki Foundation, Hoggan co-founded with Lefebvre the much lower profile strategic planning organization, Stonehouse Standing Circle which works behind the scenes to "increase the personal and political will necessary to create and implement solutions." and by virtue of it's wide range of networked media contacts, has broad international reach. http://stonehousesummit.com/about-stonehouse
So given this show of bravado by Nurse, he'll be challenging Anthony Watts to a public debate when he's over here? Or taking on the Bish or.. or.. No? Perhaps there's a 90 year old we can let him crush?
I find this language quite disturbing, especially as it comes from a President of the Royal Society.
The phrase 'Serial offenders' is usually used in context of anti-social burglars or worse pedophiles, not democratically elected decision makers like Owen Paterson. 'Crushed and buried' is Stalinist terminology. What happened to now long established and accepted ethos of rehabilitation for offenders? Is Nurse really advocating some kind of Medieval pogrom of anyone who dares to question orthodox climatology? Does he not accept that there are very many uncertainties in climate science? Does he really think that Gavin and his pals have nailed every aspect of complex atmospheric physics? The role of aerosols? Is he sure beyond any doubt that increased water vapour (and cloud cover) is a positive feedback? The role of multi-decadal oceanic oscillations? Solar magnetic cycles? The usefulness of unvalidated global climate models?
Is the President of the Royal Society really saying that nobody is allowed to question any aspect of climatology which does not square with the anthropogenic CO2 thesis?
Nurse has clearly lost the plot, and all scientific credibility by promulgating his brazen political stance in support of the AGW hypothesis. Is there a precedent for deposing a President?
Ironic footnote:
"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They'll kill us probably..." Tommy Wils, climategate1 email, (2007)
ClimateGate email 1682 - http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1682.txt
"Is the President of the Royal Society really saying that nobody is allowed to question any aspect of climatology which does not square with the anthropogenic CO2 thesis?" (lapogus)
On reading what he says again, it sounds as though he regards science as a monolith; we must believe all that scientists say or suffer the consequences. Seems a little difficult, with all the contradictions we hear, all the changes of mind. And then there was the big consensus against continental drift. And all the former kerfuffle about the aether…
(Incidentally, Arrhenius' revised paper of 1906 on the greenhouse effect argues his case from the aether hypothesis - nearly two decades after the Michelson-Morley experiment. No wonder it is never quoted.)
The guardians science editor Ian Sample is good isn't he - about as good as David Shukman!
The Royal Society and Nobel have both been elitist puppet shows for a century. For some history on the origins of the,
ROYAL SOCIETY FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE BY EXPERIMENT....
visit the Royal Society tab at the FauxScienceSlayer site...."Nullius in Verba"....explained....