Bishop Hill Unpresidential address
Dec 4, 2013 Royal Society 
Image: Somerset House: a meeting of the Royal Society. Via albionprints.com (click for link)Each year, the president of the Royal Society gives an address to the fellows at their annual meeting and Paul Nurse's speech last year is now available online. It's mostly fairly unremarkable stuff - extolling the virtues of the society itself; making the oft-repeated but scarcely credible claim that the society is independent of government; criticising those who reach different conclusions to Nurse's preferred scientific cliques. Most of this is in the first five minutes of the talk, and much of the rest is about the internal machinations of the society, which is probably important but frankly too dull for words. However, there's an interesting bit at the end.
Discussing official policy statements of the society, Nurse describes how they go through one or two rounds of independent review and are then signed off by the Council of the society. This approach, he says, gives them authority.Now of course the issue of policy statements was the root cause of the famous rebellion of the 41, with fellows from many different backgrounds critising the society for making unscientific statements on climate change and misusing the Society's public standing. I heard on the grapevine that the Council had discussed these issues and considered the possibility of adding caveats to the front of the reports to say that the contents were the opinions of the authors and not the society as a whole. I have no idea if this is now happening.
Nevertheless, Nurse is not going to talk about these problems, which I guess he thinks are matters for the higher-ups rather than the mass of ordinary fellows. In this way his speech is somewhat reminiscent of something from the Soviet bloc, with all the dirty laundry kept out of the sight of those who are allegedly being represented. There are even the obligatory attacks on "the enemy without":
Some bodies or individuals who have strong politically or ideologically motivated opinions about issues that involve aspects of science try to undermine the society with the tactics of the lobbyist using personal attacks, innuendo and half truths as their weapons. They are forced to use these approaches because of the strength of securely evidenced and reasoned scientific analysis that the Society pursues.
This is an interesting approach for Nurse to take, given that the statement is itself almost pure innuendo, and given, moreover, his previous remarks about Nigel Lawson, which were not only very personal but were not even half truths. His identikit-lefty's dislike of Lawson seems to have affected his judgement at that time, and it looks to me as if things have scarcely improved since. I think he needs to get over the whole "right-wingers are evil" thing that seems to underpin his every contribution to the climate debate.
Reader Comments (54)
Is this the same "Royal Society" which once boasted Boyle, Hooke, Newton and Wren? Nurse is an utter disgrace.
I love the claim by the idiotic "sHx"" that China's disdain for global warming nonsense somehow makes climatic sense "left-wing".
It's about twenty years since Chinese academics, entertained at British universities, were appalled to find that there remained places where people still believed in Marxiam, as sHx, presumably, does, even now.
In case you haven't noticed, sHx, Chavez is dead.
"In case you haven't noticed, sHx, Chavez is dead."
Never mind. We'll always have Castro.
So, "Owen Morgan", do you like mouldy pizza?
Re: Dec 5, 2013 at 8:06 PM | Lewis Deane
As Wiki tells us -
"Marxism has developed into different branches and schools of thought. Different schools place a greater emphasis on certain aspects of Classical Marxism while de-emphasizing or rejecting other aspects of Marxism, sometimes combining Marxist analysis with non-Marxian concepts. Some variants of Marxism primarily focus on one aspect of Marxism as the determining force in social development – such as the mode of production, class, power-relationships or property ownership – while arguing other aspects are less important or current research makes them irrelevant. Despite sharing similar premises, different schools of Marxism might reach contradictory conclusions from each other.[4] For instance, different Marxian economists have contradictory explanations of economic crisis and different predictions for the outcome of such crises. Furthermore, different variants of Marxism apply Marxist analysis to study different aspects of society (e.g. mass culture, economic crises, or feminism).[5]
These theoretical differences have led various socialist and communist parties and political movements to embrace different political strategies for attaining socialism and advocate different programs and policies from each other. "
But it seems to me that in whatever form Big Government simply doesn't work.