Monday
Mar172014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Nurse flounders
Mar 17, 2014 Royal Society Paul Nurse has taken to the pages of the Telegraph, although I have no idea why. He appears to have nothing to say of any importance and his analysis, such as it is, consists of platitudes. I relay the article's existence, dear reader, out of a sense of duty rather than because I think it's worth your time.
The evidence is becoming increasingly clear. However, not every question has yet been answered or every detail defined – for example, there are debates concerning the models used to predict the exact extent of global warming.
Reader Comments (59)
And I dutifully read this page without a thought of clicking down to the Telegraph. Thanks for the warning.
<quote>there are debates concerning the models used to predict the exact extent of global warming</quote>
Wow, understatement or deliberate obfuscation? Take your pick.
AR5 made me laugh: The simulation of clouds in AOGCMs has shown modest improvement
since AR4; however, it remains challenging.
Richard, you should click to the Telegraph, if only to read the comments, starting with "Nurse! He's out again!".
Does anybody else hear the 'beep beep beep this vehicle is reversing' warning of a juggernaut, or am I dreaming again ?
There's a nice whiney tone to the article - he's entering the bargaining stage.
Pointman
Roddy summaroisies the problems with it..(via twitter)
Roddy Campbell @Roddy_Campbell 2h
Gosh Paul Nurse does merrily confuse his "we's" and "our's".
Our policy
Our interests
Our planet
Paul: I don't need to, because you've once again brought the best joke back here!
Pointman: I also trust your reading very much. Bargaining it is. Looking forward to it.
I think Sir Paul Nurse is outside his very limited sphere of knowledge. A geneticist who seems to have received a Nobel Prize through luck rather than ability.
His childish attacks on Lawson and others indicate someone who feels he is a person of authority, therefore we should listen to his pearls of wisdom. The reality is that the outbursts of a spoilt child is not worth listening to!
He is of a similar mould to that of Mark Walport (out of his depth), but has the extra childish tantrum which Walport does not seem to share (thankfully).
Delighted to see that the overwhelming majority on comments at the Telegraph are negative.
Entirely agree with Pointman about the whiney tone, too. Could also add petulant of the foot-stamping why-isn't-anyone-listening-to-me-when-I-am-so-important? variety.
The Nurse shark, like the Flounder, is a bottom-dweller. It is also the only one of its genus.
Arthur C Quark: Walport and Nurse are very different personalities, to be sure. I've only talked to them once, on the same day, the encounter with Nurse because I emerged late for the next session from the Gents and bumped into the great man on the way out of the building (of a meeting of the RS on open science in June 2011 at which Walport also spoke). Thanks again to Josh for persuading me to go that day. Anyway.
You're right I think that Walport is less feisty than Nurse (a slightly nicer way of putting your final para).
But I think, as I've already said, that Pointman is right to detect bargaining in Nurse by now.
Rather than click right into mockery mode (tempting though that is) I continue to think that these two men may have some hitherto hidden strengths as UK science desperately looks for the Exit sign at the end of a truly disastrous episode.
Perhaps it would only work out well with two such different characters in the two premier positions.
Perhaps. Speculation. But David King they ain't and there's much to be said for that.
He wishes to distance himself from the catastrophic bit of cagw. The bit that got so many people their jobs, their fortunes, or their goal in life, and which provided a big boost to the pursuit of ideological ambitions.
He also wishes to show he is on message re 'it is time to move on'.
He is, I therefore surmise, a very obedient chap, a useful asset for the cause, if only ex officio and not because of any insight he brings.
It will be nice from now on to start all discussions with "I agree with Paul Nurse and the RS".
It will get interesting when the lights go out, then, there will be no such thing as a 'green believer' and when the maw of the abyss beckons them.
Ere long, I shall tarry, reaping scythe and gleaming red.
Dear Leader,
Thank you for the link.
It was a hoot from beginning to end.
If Nursey doesn't s**t himself on reading it, there is no justice in this world.
ToC
science does not do compromising bending and mending, politics does.
Many professors have abused science and will get to know it, the hard way.
It is inconceivable the RS survives, when the confidence intervals of their GCMs are breached.
Or it might survive as a sort of freakshow, while something serious is set up.
Nurset seems to prefer the consensus over the evidence.
Although immediately after he writes it, he does his best to pretend this sentence doesn't mean what it says, Nurse does admit that "at present, we cannot say that a specific weather event, including the recent storms and flooding in the UK, is the direct result of climate change."
But his use of the phrase "at present" makes the clear implication that he WANTS it to be so, and that science WILL soon be able to make a causal linkage. This is shameful. Nurse should lose his position at the Royal Society for such carelessness and imprecision. Divination, ala a Harry Potter movie is NOT a job for a scientist. The Royal Society and the American NAS are being sullied by climate alarmists and activists. Centuries of proud tradition burned up like a dung patty in a dirty cooking fire.
Nurse's article is just one cliche after another. It even starts with the well-known power-station chimneys photographed against a low sun so the white smoke and steam looks black.
Apart from trying to get out from under the 'Denier' tag by calling sceptics 'extremist sceptics' (let's see how well that one gets channelled in the future), he builds himself a fully lined cloak of double-think: the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time and support them both. This is where he pushes the meme of energy conservation while at the same time pushing for CCS - without once seeming to realise the the high cost in energy of doing so.
Finally, he wheels out the cliche of going to a doctor and believing what he tells you about treatment, so why don't you believe in AGW?
This man is not fit to clean the boots of some of the more notable Presidents of the RS. He is a pygmy standing on the shoulders of giants: not adding much to the perspective.
One can only assume that the Telegraph gave him the column inches with a comments section so that the great man could read what real people think of him.
Hang on...nurse flounders, another over-promoted murphia member bottles from a TV interview....
Are they sitting on something they don't want us to find out about?
Never forget that the RS has form...
Link
And wasn't it Lord Kelvin, when president, who said that heavier-than-air flight was impossible? Apparently he also denounced X-rays as a hoax and maintained that radio had no future. I wonder if Nurse is related...
Once again, it is important to remember what the Royal Society was when its historic global reputation was being made and what it is now when, arguably, that reputation is being frittered away by its officers trying to position it as the "UK's national academy of science".
It is beomcing increasingly clear to anyone who is willing to look at the fatcs that skeptics have been proven right, again and again:
- skeptics are right about polar bears not being in danger and that their populations are up
- skeptics are right that world sea ice is growing, not shrinking
- skeptics were right to point out the pause long before AGW promoters started their arm waving campaign
- skpetics were right to question tclaims that tibetan glaciers were going to be gone in the next few decades
- skeptics were right to point out that claims of increased cyclone activity were false
- skeptics were right to point out that slr is not increasing at anything like an alarming rate
- skeptics were right to point our that claims of massive coral reef die offs were bunk
- skeptics were right to point out that wind power is a failed policy that cannot work
- skeptics were right to point out that tkaing the UK to 0 CO2 footpring would not impact either the climate or reduce CO2 in the atmosphere to appreciable degree
- skeptics were right to ask about the lack of connection between reducing CO2 levels and any change in weather that harms people
so yes, a picture is emerging.
I feel somewhat constrained by our host's exhortation on the Walport posting, so all I can say is that the article made me feel rather ill, and that I'm so looking forward to the train crash.
He's quite right, of course. We probably only have between 300 and 500 years of shale gas available in the UK.
I look forward to watching this pessimist become disappointed.
However, not every question has yet been answered or every detail defined…
Is anything ever fully answered? Does Nurse imagine, even in his own field, that a Nobbly Prize indicates the conclusion of inquiry? I don't suppose so.
This is just rhetoric; and pretty poor stuff at that.
The "not every question has yet been answered or every detail defined" is an interesting gambit, since a typical AGW believer arguemnt against skeptics is to claim skeptics are only nibbling away on details.
The fact is some of these so-called details are thing like, is climate sensitivity 1.0o, or over 3.o0?
Will slr continue its trivial, unaccelerated rate, or is it going to increase?
Is the so-called OA still unmeasurable or will it somehow, someday, increase?
Will AGW predictions about extreme weather continue to fail, or will they someday find an actual change in trend that is ahistorical?
Will the AGW promotion industry continue to dodge discussions, or will their cowardice and rent seeking finally end?
Inquiring Minds Want to Know.
Before everyone goes to hard on Nurse, we should pause and consider that perhaps his advice is correct and is what skeptics have been recommending fro a long time. His advice is to go beyond the science and to consider what and to what extent action should, be in response to the science of AGW. As he notes this will involve engineers, economists, business leaders, politicians etc.
However Nurse does not explicitly note that all of this further action must take into account the uncertainties and incompleteness of the AGW scientific theory. An engineer given a task of building something will naturally ask just what this device is supposed to do. If the answer comes that the science is incomplete then the answer to the engineer will have to come from somewhere else. We will have to do what skeptics have long said that we have to do. We have to accept that, despite claims for some scientists to the contrary, that climatology is not yet adequate to provide any definitive answers to engineering and economic questions regarding AGW. Climate scientists can crow all they want about CO2 but, as Nurse observes, the climate models are inadequate to produce any useful predictions.
However the inadequacy and hubris of climate science does not matter to nature. We are faced with a plausible problem that potentially may have very serious consequences. Our society is faced with a serious question of what to do. I agree with many critics that the current answers are not adequate. What are we going to do. We have to go beyond the knee jerk answers and the self-interested lobbying of the current time.
'The evidence is becoming increasingly clear.'
Presumably that evidence being the longer that temps refuse to rise whilst CO2 levels do then the case for cAGW becomes ever stronger.
Perhaps only a Nobel laureate has the brains to be able to understand that logic.
hunter
Hurricane activity isn't doing what it was supposed to either, in either activity or landfall on the USA.
The following may seem off topic but maybe some climate scientists could take note. Readers may know that a gravitational wave has been detected. On a site called Hacker News I noted the following comment from "Tarrosion" made about the people who made this discovery. I hope this contributor will forgive me for repeating what he said.
"As an outsider (PhD student in a quantitative field, no relation to physics), the experimental physics community really strikes me as a class act. High standards for statistical significance, vigorously working to rule out mundane explanations before publishing data, outlining which statistical tests will be performed before data is collected...I'm a fan."
"We are faced with a plausible problem that potentially may have very serious consequences. Our society is faced with a serious question of what to do."
Actually, we're faced with many. Another 'plausible problem' is global poverty: a large proportion of the world is still economically undeveloped, with concomitant impacts on health, conflict, education, resilience against natural disasters, and quality of life. Currently, cheap energy combined with modern technology is lifting a lot of them out of poverty, but this programme is put at risk if we introduce effective curbs to cut back CO2 emissions. Those are very serious consequences, too.
There are also political risks with regard to the way we're governed - do governments have the right to regulate every aspect of people's public and private lives in the 'common interest'? Do we allow free speech, even to those who oppose the government's plans for our collective 'benefit'? Can we afford to allow free trade, even when it opposes government policy? Should individual governments be able to override supra-national entities like the UN or EU in matters of how their own countries are to be run? The answers to these questions are being decided now, and the answers will last until long after 'Global Warming' has been forgotten (like the many other eco-scares before it).
What are we going to do? It's a very serious question, with the gravest of consequences. But it's about more than just Global Warming.
Re TAG 6:01 PM.
I see a further modest warming contribution from a doubling of CO2 as quite plausible. I do not see such a doubling as likely, but it is also plausible. I do not see CO2 levels rising above current values as a major, or even a detectable, so far, driver of the climate system. I do see climate variation in the future as a plausible problem, in fact as an all but inevitable series of problems, as it has been in the past. In this circumstance, the deliberate crippling of our industrial development, and that of poor countries, is not on my list of sensible strategies. Quite the reverse. I also do not regard an implausible problem as sufficient grounds for trying to scare the wits out of children and other vulnerable groups in order to satisfy the personal and political and financial ambitions of climate alarm zealots and those who seek to exploit the astonishing political impact they have had to date.
Sandys,
The complete list is far longer than what I have written.
From the trolls here, to the learned leaders of science gleeing from debate, avoiding an accounting of AGW claims vs. reality is a basic strategy of the AGW faithful.
Not curing cancer is a form of carbon capture and storage!
Nurse!!!!!!!
Nurse is more interesting than you allow. Though he's trying hard as he can to stick to the science, he reveals his mental confusion in every sentence. Take this:
Logic demands that the second risks mentioned must be the risks of taking action, but the structure of the article suggests that he's talking about the risks of climate change. What are they? He doesn't say. They must be serious, to justify the actions proposed and supposedly being implemented. But not catastrophic, because Nurse is against catastrophism and the views of the “extreme fringe” of climate catastrophists. But who are they? Could he be talking about Mark Lynas, whose catastrophic sci-fi doom tome “Six Degrees” won a prize for best science book – from the Royal Society? Or Paul Ehrlich, who prophesied in the seventies that by the year 2000 environmental collapse would have reduced the British Isles to a stone age level of existence – and who last year was made a Fellow of the Royal Society by the surviving gibbering Neanderthals?The old saw about being promoted beyond his level of competence comes to mind, but what would I know as I am merely a rude Colonial.
When Putin reaches for the gas tap - the green establishment's tyres will be smoking with handbrake turns.
I'm liquidating my US stock portfolio tonight.
I think Vlad may turn out to be the sceptics best friend.
Pointman has it in a nutshell.
Nurse is staking an early claim for his next position. Eventually he will never have believed at all in Climate Bollocks.
Geoff:
Ha. Thanks for that. Quite cheered me up.
Nice to see he thinks I might be confused by the scientific evidence! The problem for Nurse is that I'm not confused by the real evidence aka empirical data.
Nurse may well be a cleverer man than me. But Nurse is a geneticist and I am an Earth Scientist. Why should people accept his opinion on climate change over mine? Climate science overlaps strongly into a number of areas of my academic and technical competence as well as experience. I doubt it overlaps into any of his.
I may not be a climate scientist, but I am certainly more than qualified to form my opinion and argue for it. And probably more so than Nurse.
Sir Paul says
The idea that the scientific consensus occupies the "middle ground" is something I have not come across before. It would be nice to know what ideas are supported by the catastrophists and not the scientific consensus. Also, who are the catastrophists?
Also the article tries to link to a joint report by the Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences on the evidence and causes of climate change in simple terms. It makes interesting reading - mostly for what it misses out, than what it leaves in.
There is a comedy duo in the comments who appear to believe that there is no pause and that both the Arctic and Antarctic are losing ice. Unbelievable.
There is a comedy duo in the comments who appear to believe that there is no pause and that both the Arctic and Antarctic are losing ice. Unbelievable.