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.