Paul Nurse on geoengineering

Paul Nurse has a letter in the Guardian (where else?) on the subject of geoengineering. It's less bad than you might expect.

A time may come when mankind will need to consider geoengineering the climate to counteract climatic effects of greenhouse gases. If that time comes, we need to have a good understanding of whether such efforts will work and, just as importantly, whether they will have any negative side effects. Those who oppose such exploratory research on the grounds that we do not know what its effects may be ... are missing a fundamental point of research, which is to allow us to potentially rule out any technology that would have negative effects that outweigh the positive.

Researching stuff probably does little harm, although one can certainly question whether geoengineering research, or indeed any scientific research, should be a priority for government spending at the moment. Outside the ivory tower, times are hard, but it is not obvious that Sir Paul has noticed.

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Royal Society policy lab

The Royal Society is continuing its project on open science, with a "policy lab" at the start of next month:

In the wake of ‘Climategate’, a Lancet editorial warned that the call for UEA climate scientists to make their research more transparent was a wake-up call for all researchers.  “If scientists do not adapt to the forces shaping and sustaining this revolution in the public culture of science, the trust that the public and politicians put in science will be jeopardised.

A year on, the Royal Society have launched a study looking at how science can open up: ‘Science as a public enterprise‘.  This requires understanding what forms of access are required, and to what ends.  A blanket policy on access to scientific information does not take into account the diverse demands being made on scientists.  Nor does it take into account the massive datasets, complex models and specialist equipment involved in much of modern science.  Opening up science is not a simple task, but a challenge that requires discussion and debate.

Geoffrey Boulton will be speaking on the purposes of opening up science. More details can be seen here.

Is this what's next?

A little while ago it looked as if biodiversity was going to be the next big green issue. It didn't seem to gain much traction, but here's what looks like another attempt to test the political waters: the Royal Society's latest seminar.

What would a global policy to regulate human use of fixed nitrogen look like?

A quote for Paul Nurse

I came across this quote in the transcript of the Guardian Climategate debate last year. It's McIntyre's summing up of the importance of the failure of the inquiries to address the allegations made about the CRU scientists.

If climate scientists are unoffended by the failure to disclose adverse data, unoffended by the `trick' and not committed to the principles of full, true, plain disclosure, the public will react, as they have, by placing less reliance on the pronouncements from the entire field.

The thought struck me that you could delete the word "climate" at the start and the whole thing would stand quite nicely as a message for Paul Nurse, spelling out his responsibilities to science as a whole.

An open letter to Sir Paul Nurse

Dear Sir Paul

In your article in the FT today, you repeat remarks you have made in the past about scientists having to be open about their work:

Scientists have an obligation to communicate their work to the world, and to be open and transparent about doing it. “Trust me, I’m a scientist” is not a good enough answer to give to policymakers or the general public who are looking to make informed decisions on important topics.

This is an area on which people on both sides of the global warming debate should be able to agree. However, it is clear that many in the climatological mainstream do not share this belief. The IPCC has indicated that drafts and review comments on its reports will not be published until after the main report and that, for Working Group I at least, the panel's new conflict of interest policy will not apply to the Fifth Assessment Report.

As I am sure you will agree, these decisions go against the principles of openness and transparency that you say you favour. This being the case, I am asking you, on behalf of the Royal Society, to make a public call for the IPCC to correct these issues.

I hope you can help.

Yours sincerely

More Nurse

The Royal Society meeting seems to have been very interesting, with some interesting feedback from Richard Drake, Doug Keenan and Josh.

I'm intrigued by some of the things we have learned about Paul Nurse - that he thought he had been critical of CRU for not being open with their data, that the Horizon programme was fair and balanced and that he was stung by criticism of it.

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Royal Society openness meeting

Cameron Neylon is tweeting from today's ROyal Society meeting on "Science as a public enterprise". A couple of BH readers are there, so I hope to get some more detailed reports of what was said too.

Here are some highlights from the twitterers

kaythaney

"The focus on publication - of paper and data - is too narrow."- William Dotton, OII

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RS "townhall meeting" on openness

Tickets are now available (free) for the Royal Society's Townhall Meeting on openness in science featuring Paul Nurse and Geoffrey Boulton.

This will be at the Southbank Centre in London on 8 June at 2:30pm.

Nursing a hurt - Josh 100

More cartoons by Josh here

Paul Nurse on FOI

Updated on May 26, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The Guardian has one of those articles with no comments thread, usually a sure sign that they have written something...disputable. The subject is an interview they have done with Sir Paul Nurse about FOI and scientific research. You can probably guess the contents.

Freedom of information laws are being misused to harass scientists and should be re-examined by the government, according to the president of the Royal Society.

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Ennobled scientists

I chanced upon this Wikipedia document, which outlines the House of Lords Appointment commission. This is a body designed to make non-partisan recommendations for elevation to the upper house of the UK parliament. Other recommendations are made by the political parties.

The Wiki page lists everyone proposed for elevation to the peerage since the commission was instituted in 2001. I was struck by all the familiar names:

2001 Lord Browne

2001 Lord May

2005 Lord Turner (Member of Climate Change Committee)

2005 Lord Rees

2007 Lord Krebs (Member of Climate Change Committee)

2007 Lord Stern

By strange coincidence the chairman of the House of Lords Appointments Commission is Lord Jay of Ewelme, who seems to be something to do with GLOBE International. However, he was only appointed in 2008, so there is apparently no connection to the earlier appointments. 

Odd.

Paul Nurse on trust in science

This interview with Paul Nurse appears to have been recorded in January, although I haven't seen it before. The interesting bit is at the start, with Nurse discussing the role of the blogs in science.

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Professor Bob Watson, who has just been elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Scientists and the public interest

The Royal Society has launched a new project to consider how science can be made to work for the public.

Scientific research has an enormous impact on our world and the lives of citizens. It is therefore important that science is not, and is not seen to be, a private enterprise, conducted behind the closed doors of laboratories, but a public enterprise to understand better the world we live in and our place in it. Effective dialogue about the priorities and insights of science and its relation to public values is vital. Scientists can no longer assume an unquestioning public trust.

The general theme of the project seems sound. As I have pointed out before, scientists have perverse incentives - as civil servants their economic incentive is to publish more, to attract attention and to grow their funding. The public interest is not particularly a priority. And with the Australian chief scientist noting that he sees himself as a lobbyist for the scientific community - no doubt the same situation applies in the UK - this conflict of interest is laid bare. So the idea of trying to get scientists working for the people who pay them is a good one, but I hold out little hope of an effective remedy.

And anyway, I'm not sure the Royal Society wants anyone to take the project seriously. The project is to be led by none other than Professor Geoffrey Boulton, a man whose record on creating public trust in UK science is a tad shaky, to say the least. The panel also includes Philip Campbell, the editor of Nature, whose record is little better.

The Royal Society on the temperature records

I was thinking about Doug Keenan's WSJ article about statistical significance in the global temperature records - for those unfamiliar with it, we don't know whether the recent warming is significant or not because we don't know what statistical model to adopt to describe the climate's normal behaviour. Doug has published a "director's cut" of the article at his website.

I found myself wondering how the Royal Society had explained the recent warming to the public in their new paper on climate change and, more particularly, how they had addressed the question of statistical significance. Here's the relevant excerpt:

Measurements show that averaged over the globe, the surface has warmed by about 0.8°C (with an uncertainty of about ±0.2°C) since 1850. This warming has not been gradual, but has been largely concentrated in two periods, from around 1910 to around 1940 and from around 1975 to around 2000. The warming periods are found in three independent temperature records over land, over sea and in ocean surface water. Even within these warming periods there has been considerable year-to-year variability. The warming has also not been geographically uniform – some regions, most markedly the high-latitude northern continents, have experienced greater warming; a few regions have experienced little warming, or even a slight cooling.

When these surface temperatures are averaged over periods of a decade, to remove some of the year-to-year variability, each decade since the 1970s has been clearly warmer (given known uncertainties) than the one immediately preceding it. The decade 2000-2009 was, globally, around 0.15°C warmer than the decade 1990-1999.

So, no mention of statistical significance. This is a bit disappointing really - this is our national science academy. I'm not sure that saying that recent decades are warmer than earlier ones is saying anything very much at all.

The other thing that interests me is the reference to known uncertainties. What is the magnitude of the known uncertainties in the temperature records? I'm not sure I've seen these before (or perhaps I've forgotten).