This link is useful as well;
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100136432/the-royal-society-is-a-joke/
Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by cwon14
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by cwon14
More of the Nurse double talk in action, mouthing the “anti-science” label on those who oppose his agenda;
And of course, the Royal Society’s current president Sir Paul Nurse has been quite explicit about his desire to pursue this activist role.
In September 2011, Nurse gave an interview to Nature magazine in which he appeared to formalise the Royal Society’s transformation into a political body.
Nurse wants the Society to have a stronger voice on the big policy questions of the day. ‘The Royal Society has a responsibility to provide advice on difficult issues, even if they are contentious,’ he says.
He hopes to boost the Society’s role in government decision-making by fostering greater involvement of its roughly 1,500 fellows and foreign members in preparing reports, potentially with the help of more policy staff. Nurse also wants to expand the number of authoritative and influential reports on key issues, such as nuclear power, climate change and the definition of life.
One former Royal Society Research Fellow who commented on Nurse’s article pleaded for the Society to remain above the political fray:
Great science will truly inform government policy while informed opinions on science can only fuel debate. Personally I enjoy both of these aspects of being a scientist though I know which one of these actually counts. Please do not turn The Royal Society into another policy-driven quango…
However, the following day Nurse reentered the political fray, launching an attack on what he saw as ‘anti-science’ attitudes in the US Republican party. It appears, then, that a policy-driven quango is exactly what Nurse intends the Society to become.
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Comment on Demon Coal by Fred Moolten
One of the important points that emerges from the material Pekka has cited above (and it’s also in my article) is that for the most vulnerable marine organisms, the calcifiers, pH is less important than carbonate saturation. They are only loosely correlated, and so a hazardous decline in carbonate saturation can occur with only a small pH change. Conversely, if atmospheric CO2 concentrations rise very slowly (e.g., over many thousands of years), carbonate concentrations can be maintained fairly well even in the face of a declining pH. For this reason, the current rate of ocean acidification is more likely to reduce carbonate saturation than even greater changes in some past eras that occurred very slowly.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by MrE
A better analogy is that Nurse is like a modern day Faust.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by tempterrain
Patients are free to seek and ignore whatever opinions and advice they choose. Sir Paul Nurse isn’t saying otherwise.
He himself could have shopped around for the sort of advice he may well have preferred to hear. The Lindzens or the Judith Currys of the heart specialist world would have advised either that there was no problem, or it was all just too hard to decide in a situation of deep uncertainty.
Instead he chose to act. Of course,if he’d sucessfully chosen to take a big risk, either he or the UK’s NHS would have now been financially better off!
There’s not much wrong with this analogy.
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Comment on Messes and super wicked problems by Judith Curry
Kennedy Maize has written an article at Power Magazine on Climate Science: A Super Wicked Mess, that is well worth reading
http://www.powermag.com/blog/index.php/2012/03/14/climate-science-a-super-wicked-mess/
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by DocMartyn
I suggest we perform a simple experiment to test Prof Nurse’s postulate that those with Scientific Knowledge should drive political opinion.
On this board we have a wide range of scientifically literate and intelligent readers and responders.
In humans, gastrulation (nuclear DNA maturation) occurs around 16 days after fertilization and birth at about 40 weeks.
So, can we have a ‘Scientific’ consensus as to when human life begins or are there some questions that can have no truthful ‘Scientific’ answer?
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Comment on Demon Coal by hunter
PP,
Rationalizing that the lack of evidence of OA is not a valid reason to dismiss it is sour grapes. Pun intended.
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Comment on The long, slow thaw? by tonyb
When I come to look at the unexpected warmth I identified at the 1538 start date of this article it would be useful to look at this paper in greater detail;
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/mholland/papers/Polyak_2010_historyofseaiceArctic.pdf
page 1772
‘The subsequent decline of bowhead abundances in the CAA is consistent with the abandonment of the high Arctic of Canada and Greenland by bowhead hunters, while Thule living in more southern Arctic regions increasingly focused on alternate food resources.
The warming event around 1500A.D.is identified by climatic simulations in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic and is explained by the internal variability of atmospheric circulation (Crespinetal.2009). The subsequent cooling culminated in the‘‘LittleIceAge’’,between ca1600 and 1850AD, when ice conditions in the high Arctic remained especially prohibitive for navigation(e.g., Altet al.,1985).’
tonyb
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Comment on Demon Coal by Latimer Alder
Hi David
You are of course at liberty to choose to read my stuff in any which way you like.
But , though you may dislike my mode of expression, I don’t think that I overstepped any of Judith’s guidelines in any of my post.
This is a place where robust expression of a variety of viewpoints is allowed. Some are very pro-alarmist, some extremely sceptical, some just plugging their own ideas. Others here just to disrupt and derail the conversations. It is a noisy and rambunctious place.
It is emphatically not the cloistered calm of the Senior Common Room or the University Lecture Hall. You are judged on the contribution you make here, not on whatever success – or none – you may have achieved elsewhere. There is no special respect sought or given to academic status. But those who can make a case well and defend it soundly gain respect. While those who find the heat of debate too much usually fade away.
It is, I think pretty much unique among all the climate blogs for the amount of many to man as well as one to one and one to many interactions that it generates No other IMO is able to do quite so much of all three.
You may have to hold your nose or close your eyes occasionally, but in general this is a grand and lively place to be.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by Martin Lack
This appears to be a re-visiting of the arguments Nurse used to such great effect to humiliate James Delingpole just over a year ago. For example, Delingpole admitted that:
– he believes concern about climate change is being driven by a <em>“political agenda”</em> seeking <em>“control”</em> over people;
– <em>“the peer review process has been perhaps irretrievably corrupted”</em> (presumably he meant ‘discredited’?) by Climategate;
– Science should now be assessed by <em>“peer-to-peer review”</em> over the Internet by thousands and thousands of people including <em>“people like me</em> [i.e. him!] <em>that haven’t got a scientific background”</em>.
When Nurse queried the legitimacy of this [<strong>non</strong>-peer review] process, by asking if he would or could read peer-reviewed scientific literature, Delingpole’s response was <strong>stupendously illogical</strong>: <em>“It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed science papers because… I haven’t got the scientific expertise… I am an interpreter of interpretations…”</em>
This tells you all you need to know about the fallacy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketplace_of_ideas" rel="nofollow">the marketplace of ideas</a>
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Comment on Demon Coal by Tom
Red Bart, it sounds like your are in the right business.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by Donald Rapp
There are many phenomena in nature that, for one reason or another, are not susceptible to verification by independent testing. These typically include events that either occurred a long time ago or that occurred at distant sites not accessible to us, or both. Examples include the expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang, the variations in climate of the Earth in the past or in the future, the origin of life on Earth, putative existence of life elsewhere in the Universe, the evolution of species on Earth, and other such topics. There is no way to go back into the past or travel great distances to directly verify hypotheses. Although the remnants of the past may be discernible to some extent in proxies that exist in the present, these tend to have significant limitations. For such phenomena that occurred long ago and/or in distant locations, scientists create hypotheses that would “explain” how these processes might have occurred in conformity with the known laws of science. If these hypotheses provide a reasonable explanation of phenomena and are in conformity with scientific laws, they acquire the elevated status of a theory. Such a theory is typically not unique and represents one viewpoint—often a preconceived viewpoint. It provides one possible explanation for events that cannot be verified by any known means. Conjecture for things improvable is a safe venture—no one can ever prove you wrong. It is far more dangerous to predict tomorrow’s weather than it is to predict the climate 100 years from now—tomorrow’s weather is subject to practical test. I call this kind of science “subjective science”. It is not amenable to detailed verification such as the laws of motion. While some subjective science has strong foundations (e.g. evolution, continental drift) the foundation of almost every subjective aspect of climate change are weak.
Scientists do not seem to be able to shrug their shoulders and admit that we just don’t know the answers to some questions. What happens is that one of the unprovable hypotheses in a subjective science gains popularity amongst scientists and is regarded by the majority as the most credible. When a significant number agree, a consensus evolves. The consensus acts like a gigantic gravitational field, drawing in more and more scientists. Eventually, the consensus gels, and ultimately hardens into a belief system — an orthodoxy. The foundations are often weak, and not understood by the public. The emergence of the consensus as the essence of reality in science has replaced scientific skepticism. For further elaboration, go to:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Climate-Debate-Donald-Rapp/dp/1469967111/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331739084&sr=1-2
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Comment on Demon Coal by Latimer Alder
@Fred
Fine
So the problem that you have spent so long wittering on to us about has very little whatsoever to do with pH or ocean acidification or whatever term you all use to frighten the public with this week.
It is in fact ‘the speed of a decline on carbonate saturation’.
Fair enough.
As you are a man who likes to be exact, can we expect you now to be republishing all your previous works on the topic and substituting
‘the speed of decline of carbonate saturation’ for all previous references to ‘ocean acidification’?
And, just so that we are sure that we all understand correctly, what rate of ‘decline of carbonate saturation’ has been experimentally shown to be hazardous to living things? It is all very well discussing a ‘fast’ rate and a ‘slow’ rate, but we need some numbers to help us here.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by Bart R
So let me see if I follow this argument..
Delingpole is to be commended as he’s so epitomizes the great fiction writers of the English language, while Hansen is to be villified because at one point he was middle-aged?
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Comment on Demon Coal by Bart R
Jim Cripwell
No. Really no.
It’s not that simple.
Here’s only one of several issues:
Recall that the graph plots slopes, not temperatures.
It is a derivative plot. To obtain _temperature_ again from the slope (derivative) of temperature at any point requires integration.
If f(T) is the function that plots temperature, then Girma’s trends plot in its limits approaches f’(T).
The solution to the integral f’(T) will be f(T) + C.
Some constant term is introduced in the solution, and that C value is unknown and unknowable.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by Bart R
Beth Cooper
..brings to mind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjPo0ewuCw
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Comment on Should we tell the whole truth about climate change? by ceteris non paribus
”
Whilst I don’t mention it, I anticipate that there will be experiments published later this year using spectrometers to demonstrate that warm gases do not absorb emission from cooler sources.
”
Of course, it goes without saying that these experiments will disprove the existence of the microwave oven.
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Comment on Sir Paul Nurse on the science-society relationship by omanuel
Statements and actions by “leaders” of the scientific community, like Sir Paul Nurse of the UK’s Royal Society and Dr. Ralph Cicerone of the US National Academy of Science, help expose deepest historical roots of the global climate scandal.
The actions of Dr. Peter Gleick (member of NAS and AGU) last month reminded me of actions by members of AGU and NAS fifty-six years and thirty-six years earlier at the 1956 and 1976 National Meetings of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, DC.
Henry KIssinger may be the only one still alive who can confirm/deny if the root cause is FEAR instilled by the vaporization of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
With kind regards,
Oliver
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Comment on 21st century solar cooling by Bart R
You make fair points.
That’d have to be some smooth water for your angle of incidence to bear out completely.
I’m more familiar with oceans that have waves in them.
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