Monckton submits this rebuttal argument to the piece in the New Scientist Stamp out anti-science in US politics here. He doesn’t expect his rebuttal to be published.
Background: Paul Nurse is a Nobel prizewinner and Royal Society president.
Stamp out anti-science in UK science
By Christopher Monckton
It is time to reject UK political movements that masquerade as scientific societies while turning their backs on science, says former adviser to Margaret Thatcher FRS Christopher Monckton
IF YOU respect science you will probably be disturbed by the following opinions.
On climate: true science may be found in “the consensus opinions of experts” [1], we can “say with assurance that human activities cause weather changes” [1], recent variations are not “natural, cyclical environmental trends” [1], the manmade CO2’s contribution to the annual carbon cycle is not the 3% imagined by the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, but 86% [2], “anthropogenic climate change is already affecting every aspect of our lives” [3],
On freedom of information requests asking publicly-funded scientists for their data: the requests are “a tool to intimidate some scientists” [4].
On a sceptical interviewer: the force of Sir Paul’s replies had left him “tongue-tied” and had compelled him to stop the cameras on several occasions, when the interviewer had in fact told Sir Paul he suffered from hypoglycaemia and needed to take regular breaks to maintain his glucose intake [5].
On US politics: voters should not choose Republicans [1].
You would probably be even more disturbed to be told that these are the opinions expressed not by some climate scientist or politician but by Sir Paul Nurse, the geneticist who heads the world’s oldest taxpayer-funded lobby-group, the grandly-named and lavishly-grant-aided Royal Society.
It’s alarming that a country which leads the world in science – the home of Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin and James Clerk Maxwell – might be turning its back on science. How can this be happening? What can be done?
One problem is treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate. When some scientists try to sway public opinion, they employ the tricks of the debating chamber: cherry-picking data, ignoring the consensus opinions of experts (who, in the peer-reviewed economic literature, are near-unanimous that it is cheaper to pay for the damage arising from any global warming that may occur than to spend anything now on attempted mitigation), adept use of a sneer or a misplaced comparison, reliance on the power of rhetoric rather than argument. They can often get away with this because the media rely too much on confrontational debate in place of reasoned discussion.
It is essential, in public issues, to separate science from politics and ideology. Get the science right first, then discuss the political implications. Scientists also need to work harder at discussing the issues better and more fully in the public arena, clearly identifying what they know and admitting what they don’t know.
Another concern is science teaching in schools. Is it good enough to produce citizens able to cope with public discussions about science? We have to ensure that science is being taught in schools – not pseudoscience such as a one-sided belief in the more luridly fanciful claims of climate extremists. With the rise of politicized science in the UK, measures need to be put in place to safeguard science classes. This has been difficult to maintain particularly in the US.
We need to emphasise why the scientific process is such a reliable generator of knowledge – with its respect for evidence, for scepticism, for consistency of approach, for the constant testing of ideas. Everyone should know and understand why the processes that lead to astronomy are more reliable than those that lead to astrology, or the wilder conclusions of the environmental propagandists adopted as though they were science by the IPCC and naively but profitably parroted by the likes of Nurse.
Finally, scientific leaders have a responsibility to expose the bunkum, not to perpetuate it. Scientists have not always been proactive about this. They need to be vigilant about what is being said in the public arena. They need to be vigilant about what scientific societies are publicising about science in their name, as four Fellows of the Royal Society did recently in forcing a complete and now largely sensible rewrite of the Society’s previously extremist statement about climate science. They take on the Paul Nurses when necessary. At elections, scientists should ensure that science is on the agenda and nonsense is exposed. If that nonsense is extreme enough – as Sir Paul’s ill-informed statements on climate science have been – then the response should be very public.
If scientists and scientific societies in the UK are anti-science and are allowed to carry the day it will ultimately hurt the British economy. The best scientists will head for the established leaders of science, such as the emerging powerhouses of China and India, whose leaders have realized that the climate scare has been more than somewhat oversold. But beyond that, the Royal Society’s present leadership will damage the UK’s standing in the world. Who will be able to take those leaders seriously? Scientists may not care, but they should.
Science is worth fighting for. It helps us understand the world and ourselves better and will benefit all humanity.
We have to hope that the people of the UK will see through some of the nonsense being foisted on them by vocal minorities. It is time to reject – and to de-fund – political movements that pose as scientific societies while rejecting science and taking us back into the dark rather than forward into a more enlightened future.
Acknowledgements
Nearly all of this article was written by Sir Paul Nurse and published in New Scientist on September 14. With remarkably few changes, the present article comes to a legitimate conclusion opposite to that of Sir Paul. The New Scientist will not print it, of course.
References
- Nurse, P, 2011, Stamp out science in US politics, New Scientist, November 14, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128302.900-stamp-out-antiscience-in-us-politics.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
- Booker, C, 2011, How BBC warmists abuse the science, Sunday Telegraph, January 29, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8290469/How-BBC-warmists-abuse-the-science.html#dsq-content.
- Motl, L., 2011, BBC Horizon: president of Royal Society defends AGW ideology, The Reference Frame, January 25, http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/01/bbc-horizon-president-of-royal-society.html
- Jha, A., 2011, Freedom of information laws are used to harass scientists, The Guardian, May 25. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/25/freedom-information-laws-harass-scientists.
- Delingpole, J., 2011, Sir Paul Nurse’s big boo-boo, climaterealists.com, January 30, http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7127.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
@Ralph – 50 or 500 hundred years for peak oil? That sounds more like clay than stone. But the point of this discussion about peak oil being nonsense is being missed. We will someday experience peak oil. So what?
The real point of that post was regarding technocracy, and it’s belief that scientists and engineers should rule over the rest of us because of their expertise.
@Lazy Teenager – Do you know there was once a whale oil crisis? A substitute was found. Nobody worries about peak whale oil anymore (but many of us are concerned about the many endangered whale species). I don’t believe you read the article at the Wall Street Journal, but then again, I’m not sure it’s available without a subscription.
The first time the world was concerned about running out of oil was in 1880. With every looming oil shortage, new deposits have been found and new technology developed for extracting more oil from existing resources, Do you know that known oil reserves are many times more than the total of all oil so far consumed humans and more oil is being discovered on a regular basis? One more fact — as the price of oil goes up, more of these reserves become recoverable.
@R. Gates — You’re right that my criticism was not constructive, but I do stand by my comments. The government-education complex has ruined public education in this country. The blame starts with unconcerned parents then takes a strong left turn through the Education Schools at our colleges and universities and goes straight on through to all levels of our government. The teachers unions oppose virtually every meaningful reform. The notion that more spending equals support for education is a false notion.
Our schools have undeniably been dumbed down. Self-esteem and social engineering should not be the focus of education. How many universities now offer remedial classes for incoming freshman, and why? How do our test scores compare to other nations? Why is our achievement so low? Why has there been no improvement since the Department of Education was created? Why has spending increased so much but results have not?
I come from a family of educators. I once took education classes (for an education degree) and found them to be completely useless. I changed my major to something else. I now teach computer programming part-time at our local community college. Strange isn’t it, that I’m qualified to teach college but not high school?
The internet has also brought a world of disinformation right to our fingertips. People have come to believe they don’t need to know anything, just how to use Google to find it. Learning has suffered and so has the ability to use critical thought to sort the wheat from the chaff.
James Sexton says:
September 18, 2011 at 8:18 am
lol, well Merkel said they would. I just don’t see how they’re going to pull this off. This should be very interesting.
=========================================================
Claim is new reduced emissions coal plants…………..
Analysis: German coal imports to rise despite green lobbying
Reuters) – Germany’s coal imports look set to increase until at least the middle of the decade, despite carbon pollution concerns and anti-coal lobbying that has succeeded in stopping many new coal-fired projects.
Coal supplies 42 percent of German power, and as the economy accelerates, steelmakers and utilities are stepping up their use of imported coal.
Some new coal-fired power capacity is still starting up and needs firing over its long lifetime.
“Germany can only maintain its industrial activity in the recovery with competitively priced power,” and coal imports are easily available and do not involve taxpayer subsidies, said Wolfgang Ritschelm the managing director of hard coal importers lobby VdKI.
“For a number of years it looked as if there were no new coal-to-power plants possible, but the fact is that some 8,300 MW are under construction to replace old units,” he added.
The increase in imports to fuel this capacity will come in the form of hard coal, which is already mainly imported.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/02/us-germany-coal-imports-analysis-idUSTRE6812GQ20100902
Latitude says:
September 18, 2011 at 8:11 am
“3) Arctic Sea Ice extent, area, volume returns to where it was in the late 1970′s”
==============================================================
The early satellite versions had a higher ice bias…………………….
They have been constantly “tuning” the results, reading melt ponds, etc………………….
_____
Latitude, I don’t know if you’re trying to suggest that in fact seasonal sea ice has not actually been declining over the past 30+ years, but it is in fact all satellite bias…but if you are, it is an absurd notion. Yes, satellites have been getting better, but so too, the ice has definitely, unmistakenly, undeniably been declining. Skeptics (such as Joe Bastardi) would posit that this decline must turn around soon, based on natural cycles, but in that estimation of course, there’s been no room for calculating the effects of increased greenhouse gases, which the global climate models do. Joe is a very good weather forecaster, and should stick with that.
Hmm, Monckton is still in the game, eh?
Nuke Nemesis says:
September 18, 2011 at 8:32 am
James Sexton says:
September 17, 2011 at 6:53 pm
…I was contemplating this just the other day.
———————————————————————
“The internet has also brought a world of disinformation right to our fingertips. People have come to believe they don’t need to know anything, just how to use Google to find it. Learning has suffered and so has the ability to use critical thought to sort the wheat from the chaff.”
========================================================
Nuke, thank you for articulating the thought I was trying to convey. Apparently, I’ve suddenly lost the ability to properly express thoughts to where people can understand what I’m stating. Maybe its the beer. Yes, there’s a huge difference between having information and having discernment to use said information. For those that possess such skills, even disinformation can be quite instructive.
@Nuke Nemesis who said:
“We aren’t running out of oil this decade, or next, or the one after that. Oil production may peak during that period, but so what? Do you think we won’t advance technologically?”
I fear for our ability to advance technology so long as scientifically-illiterate politicians are in control. Their capacity for obstructionism appears to be infinite. If technology were advancing, we would already have operational breeder reactors and a solution for the nuclear waste that current reactors create. As it is, we are dependent on other countries to advance technology. Not a happy thought, is it?
Latitude says:
September 18, 2011 at 8:39 am
James Sexton says:
September 18, 2011 at 8:18 am
lol, well Merkel said they would. I just don’t see how they’re going to pull this off. This should be very interesting.
=========================================================
Claim is new reduced emissions coal plants…………..
Coal supplies 42 percent of German power, and as the economy accelerates, steelmakers and utilities are stepping up their use of imported coal.
………………
“Germany can only maintain its industrial activity in the recovery with competitively priced power,” and coal imports are easily available and do not involve taxpayer subsidies, said Wolfgang Ritschelm the managing director of hard coal importers lobby VdKI.
======================================================
Well, at least Germany understands it. Economies cannot progress without more cheap, reliable, and readily available energy. Presently, if you don’t have nukes, coal is the answer. And visa versa. If someone really wanted to get rocking with industry, they’d do both……..China comes to mind.
As always, I am pleased to see Monckton step into the fray. Indeed it is a pleasure to see the so-called consensus and so-called settled scientists squirming and sputtering with righteousness and indignation.
Monckton is a world class protagonist who sees Nurse as an ungainly apologist for authoritarian science. Nurse is accelerating the loss of confidence in science and Monckton calls him on it.
John
This is the real problem with “Peak Oil” — We may voluntarily and arbitrarily put so much of our resources off limits that we will be unable to supply enough oil to meet our needs.
Smokey, your exam is just typical internet. The exam has its own facts that show it was not from 1895. Cars were beyond uncommon and 40 miles an hour was not something that anyone could relate to. And that value for the speed of light probably was not available in 1895.
Mark S, I find nothing in those videos that affects Monkton in any way. The first 5 minutes are filled with lies and half truths. The last 14 years have been cooling despite what the video says. And to say that the current period is the hottest in the last 150 years doesn’t change the point that it is cooling. The video tries to say that it is still getting warmer. That’s wrong. But even if it were true, that it’s now warming at a lesser rate, that would debunk the notion that humans are responsible for the warming since human activity toward burning fossil fuels has not diminished. So human activity cannot be the main driver of climate.
Monkton’s claims are still valid.
END OF STORY!
To Bruce Cobb and Mac the Knife: The reason writers use quotation marks is to set off those words which are their own, from the words borrowed from others. It is highly unusual to use whole paragraphs, without quotation marks and a direct referenced attribution. A reader who had not read Nurses’s article might think that only the last paragraph, or the third, or maybe the fifth, were Monckton’s. In fact most of Monckton’s piece uses Nurses’s words. This is not satire.
This PNAS paper shows no correlation between CO2 and Temperature over the last 500 million years:
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167.full
Refer to figure 4.
Looking at the link provided by Smokey, it is clear that we once knew about climate but have simply forgotten that knowledge (from this “1895 8th Grade Final Exam”) …
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
What I would like to know is what the correct answer was defined to be?
The difficult thing with the CAGW hypothesis is not finding something that can falsify it but finding something that actually supports it.
Billy Liar says: September 18, 2011 at 8:14 am
Jessie says:September 18, 2011 at 1:54 am
You forgot to turn off your italics!
REPLY: I fixed that now, Anthony
Muchly appreciated on both accounts.
Billy this link below FYI and the work of Luigi Galvani [& Alessandro Volta who is not mentioned].
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2002-09/itsalive.html
Humphrey Davy’ dialogue from which I provided quote is the 1838 publication, NOT at all 1947, as I incorrectly stated. Sorry.
Hopefully Anthony will place an erratum against that one!
@richard S Courtney says: September 18, 2011 at 12:52 am
Excellent exposure of R. Gates misdirection’s and lies.
James Sexton, my views are very considered and I’m quite prepared to defend them rationally. They do not arise from bigotry. Your reference to “Newton, Planck, and Monsignor Lemaître” makes the common mistake of giving Christianity credit for their science merely because they were Christians. Likewise your reference to the founders.
Like any social organization, Christianity must be examined in terms of itself, as a system, rather than in terms of the behavior of a few individuals. Christianity, as a system, has always been hostile to free thought, whether philosophy, “heresy,” or science. I can refer you, for starters, to Charles Freeman’s “The Closing of the Western Mind” for a description of the relentless and violent suppression of any thought that threatened Christianity’s power, after it achieved political power in Greco-Roman times. That’s not to say that a majority of Christians today, as individuals or even as ministers, would support such intolerance. Those in the West, at any rate, have had their values leavened by the Enlightenment. However, Christianity as a system still contains all the principled theological absolutism that would lead right back to that intolerance, should Christianity ever again achieve political power as a state-enforced religion.
Islam is worse, I might add, because unlike Christianity Islam explicitly permits no possible distinction between religion and state and includes that a vicious religious intolerance is divinely mandated. Bat Ye’or’s, “The Dhimmi” is required reading here, as is Ibn Warraq’s “Why I Am Not a Muslim.” Islam is also hostile to free thought, and can no more take credit for the accomplishments of scientists who happened to be Muslim, than can Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any religion for the accomplishments of its believers.
James Sexton. While you are correct that in mediaeval (and other) times Christianity was guilty of the the suppression of free thought and scientific endeavour, Christianity extols virtues that are counter to those of the globalists behind the push for world government, the 911 attacks, every other major terrorist event, the carbon trading scam world governance infrastructure etc.
These criminals, i.e Rothchild, Rockefella, Morgan, Soros, Kissinger, Strong etc have orchestrated a massive atheist anti-Christian crusade online and in the media/hollywood that they own to destroy absolute morality, family values, the role of the patriarch and to promote a dog-eat-dog evolutionary competitive, materialistic, selfish mindset to corrode the social fabric of society. They also created feminism toward this end.
They also want to replace it with an eco-fascist, Gaia Mother goddess, new age religion to control the masses, it also ties in nicely to their eco-fascist, enviro-nazi carbon trading world governance infrastructure, thus the priests of the new age world religion will be the criminal cabal at the head of the new world government. They want the allegiance of world populations, especially the youth to be toward the state, not a God.
While I am not a Christian I recognise the agenda behind the massive recent attack on Christianity. It also serves to divide society, the globalists have been making sure the religions, races and genders have been too busy fighting each other to focus on the real enemies, the bankers behind the federal reserve and the bank of England, IMF etc. Divide and conquer is one of their primary tools, after all, they intentionally created the credit crisis, 911, London train bombings etc, the gulf oil spill, the three sets of trapped miners, the bay of plenty oil spill recently, all in the name of destroying local industry, the economy, and demonising fossil fuels to rationalise their carbon trading scam. Once world economies are in ruins as per their plan, they’ll step in with world government.
It’s funny how everything degenerates into a religious discussion nowadays….I wonder why…
Anyone that wants to rant against me because their cognitive dissonance or allegiance prevents them from acknowledging the truth of my post, don’t. Do the research. I’m right.