- Bishop Hill blog

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.

Update on Sep 4, 2014 by

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.'