An early leaving present

As Paul Nurse heads towards the exit door of the Royal Society later this year, Mike Kelly has sent him an early leaving present, a withering attack on the society's handling of the climate change issue.

...Human-sourced carbon dioxide is at best one of many factors in causing climate change, and humility in front of this complexity is the appropriate stance.

Yet the Society continues to produce a stream of reports which reveal little sign of this. The latest example is the pre-Christmas booklet A Short Guide To Climate Science. Last year also saw the joint publication with the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Climate Change: Evidence And Causes, and a report called Resilience. Through these documents, the Society has lent its name to claims – such as trends towards increasing extreme weather and climate casualties – that simply do not match real-world facts.

Both the joint report with the NAS and the Short Guide answer 20 questions on temperatures, sea-level rises and ocean acidification. But a report today by the academic council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which includes several Society Fellows and other eminent scientists, states the Society has ‘left out’ parts of the science, so the answers to many of the questions ought to be different.

I have personal experience of this selectivity. Last year, at the request of the president, I produced a paper that urged the Society’s council to distance itself from the levels of certainty being expressed about future warming.

I said it ought at least to have a ‘plan B’ if the pause should last much longer, so calling the models into still more serious question. I got a polite brush-off.

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Royal extremism

The Royal Society's policy people are working hard on their carbon footprints, jetting off to a conference in Sendai, Japan on the subject of disaster risk reduction, with particular reference to weather events.

Weather disasters are a bit of a theme in Carlton House Gardens at the moment. In the last few days the society has also produced a policy statement on the subject, which called for a top-down approach based on central planning and target-setting. Vorsprung durch Sozialismus! There was also a report at the end of last year.

Throughout all of these documents there is a sly elision of weather and climate. If you go back to the announcement of last year's report you will read:

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The Oz guide to climate change

In the wake of the Royal Society's recent quick guide to climate change, the Australian Academy has produced their own newbies' guide which can be seen here.

It contains some interesting bits and bobs, for example this bit on extreme rainfall.

Heavy rainfall events have intensified over most land areas and will likely continue to do so, but changes are expected to vary by region.

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The Royal Society's latest green campaign

As I think I've mentioned before, when I wrote my Nullius in Verba report on the Royal Society's curiously unscientific approach to the climate change question, there was apparently outrage in the upper echelon's of the organisation at my suggestion that they had now been reduced to the lowly status of a left-wing campaigning organisation.

What then to make of this post on the Royal Society's "In Verba" blog on the "sustainable development" agenda:

One of the things that makes 2015 so important is the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, a new set of globally-applicable goals that will be agreed at a UN summit in September. Their aim? To be sustainable development’s zeitgeist, addressing the most pressing global challenges of our time – from climate change to healthcare to food security.

Sustainable development is of course an overtly political idea, if one that is so lacking in definition that it manages to take in the whole range of state-planned idiocy from morally repugnant to completely illogical. Doesn't this make my point for me?

Hide the incline

The Royal Society has issued a new guide called A Short Guide to Climate Science, the latest in a long series of publications, beginning with Bob Ward's magnum opus, Facts and Fictions About Climate Change, that attempt to guide the public away from any awkward questions on the subject of global warming. It's a slim tome - just 8 pages long - but the Royal has managed to pack a great deal of public relations effort into it.

As one would expect, there is barely a caveat in sight, with the credibility of the models not mentioned at all and all kinds of tricks on display. For example, the "2000s were warmer than 1990s" line is dusted off and given an airing once again, as if this somehow contradicted the pause. The rise in Antarctic sea ice is tiptoed round in brilliant fashion, with an insinuation that scientists understand why their models are wrong in this area. I was also amused to see the dry areas becoming drier thing being aired again. I thought this had been thoroughly debunked?

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A right royal contradiction

Updated on Nov 27, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Today the Royal Society publishes its report on resilience to extreme weather events and it's a bundle of laughs. I confess I haven't read the whole thing - it was only sent to me late last night - and you will see why I didn't want to persevere.

As ever with these things it's good to start at the back, where we learn that the project was funded, among others, by Jeremy Grantham. (I wonder who approached whom?). The list of those consulted was also interesting, including familiar names such as:

• Sam Fankhauser
• Geoffrey Boulton
• John Beddington
• Brian Hoskins
• Keith Shine
• Eric Wolff

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Diary dates, feedback edition

The Royal Society is to hold a meeting on climate feedbacks at the start of December:

The response of Earth’s climate system to a perturbation depends on the sign and strength of several feedback processes. This meeting will present critical assessments of major feedbacks, including those (such as ice sheets and the carbon cycle) operating over long timescales. For each, their role in past and present climate change, and their expected future effects will be discussed.

Details here, including a detailed programme.

The credibility of the Royal

The Royal Society seems to have got itself into a bit of a pickle over an article it published back in 2007, which claimed that a rare snail in the Seychelles had been forced into extinction, a later paper claiming that this was due to climate change.

After the original claim was made, a rebuttal was issued, which the Royal Society refused to publish.

Now, it seems the snail in question has been rediscovered.

But the Royal Society is still refusing to publish the rebuttal because it is now seven years old.

Correcting the record is for wimps, it seems.

Diary date, millenarian edition

6:30 pm — 8:00 pm on Tuesday 28 October 2014 at The Royal Society, London

Join Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society and Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, as they discuss the new opportunities – and need – for collaboration between the traditional academic disciplines to respond to the big issues of our time, highlighting why the UK’s research base is such an important national asset.

Sir Paul Nurse has been President of the Royal Society since 2010. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001 and is also Chief Executive of The Francis Crick Institute.

Lord Nicholas Stern of Brentford became the 29th President of the British Academy in July 2013. He is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government, and also Chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Details here.

The coming president

Updated on Sep 5, 2014 by Bishop Hill

After Paul Nurse's outburst yesterday, my thoughts turned to the end of his term as president. The Royal Society elects its leaders for a period of five years so Nurse will step down at the end of 2015.

Who, we wonder, will replace him?

One assumes that I am not the only one who has wondered about the succession; the backroom boys at the Royal are no doubt taking soundings already. The Society likes the man at the helm (thus far it's always a man) to have a Nobel prize in the display cabinet, which does rather restrict the field. I'm not aware of a list of living British laureates, but perhaps readers can suggest likely candidates. One name that occurred to me was John Sulston, the medical scientist who shares some of the millenarian views of many recent holders of the post.

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Crusher Nurse fails to squeeze

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.'

Quote of the day, alarm edition

Every profession has its bad apples, but most try to discipline them. The Royal Society purports to oversee British science, but where is it when its members clearly cross the boundary between dispassionate research and commercial interest? The truth is that the one disease to which there is no known antidote is panic. It is a disease that politicians and professionals (including journalists) have a vested interest in propagating.

Simon Jenkins considers alarmism in science

Royal Society has lost the argument, cannot be trusted

Readers will remember Paul Nurse's infamous speech in Melbourne, in which he issued a fairly spectacular attack at Nigel Lawson:

We saw that, for example, in Britain with a politician, Nigel Lawson, who would go on the television and talk about the scientific case, and he was trained as a politician; you made whatever case you can to convince the audience. So he would choose two points and say, look, no warming is taking place, knowing that all the other points you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case, but he was just wanting to win that debate on television. And that is of course over-spilling political views into your science.

As Lawson pointed out in a subsequent letter this statement was entirely untrue:

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The descent of broadcasting

Pour yourself a coffee, open a packet of biscuits, and sit yourself down in a comfy chair to read Ben Pile's long and utterly fascinating survey of the descent of science broadcasting and in particular the BBC's Horizon strand. With side swipes at, among others, Paul Nurse, Simon Singh, Iain Stewart and David Attenborough it is unmissable. Take this bit:

Nurse’s contempt for ‘politics and ideology’ and ‘polemicists and commentators’ is simple contempt for the viewer. Nurse asks for his trust, but does not reciprocate — the viewer is too easily misled, not being sufficiently equipped, too vulnerable to ‘others who don’t understand the science’. Science is just too complicated for the public. The values of the contemporary Royal Society are now identical to the values of the producers of Horizon: the public is a dangerous, contemptible moron.

Read the whole thing.

Lord Stern FRS

Updated on May 1, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Congratulations to Lord Stern, who has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society. According to the press release, this is:

...in recognition of his work challenging the world view on the economics of climate change and his distinguished career in mathematical economics with involvement in industry and in government.

I hear on the grapevine that the bigwigs at the Royal Society were a bit miffed by the suggestion in Nullius in Verba that the society was a political advocacy operation. The elevation of Stern - whose report on climate economics was criticised by the entirely non-sceptic economist William Nordhaus as "political in nature" and having "advocacy as its purpose" - is doing little to assuage my doubts.

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