Arrogant patronisig hypocritcal bastard: Paul Nurse yesterdayThe BBC exists purely I think to make me angry. And I pay them to do it! I'm less resentful of involuntarily paying $200 to two plastic titted whores in the back room of the Glitter Gulch in Las Vegas to work me over a few years ago than I am of the £140 a year I pay the BBC for my license fee just so they can lie to me and patronise me in my living room. Bastards.
Paul Nurse will I hope live long enough to feel utterly ashamed and embarrassed for his part in taking science and the Royal society over the cliff tops like lemmings over AGW. Some day soon this entire bullshit movement will be proven to be wildly exaggerated bullshit and exposed as a politically motivated heist of the general public's taxes.
Horizon on BBC2 tonight was standard blinkered BBC climate change hysteria. The analogy used to try and embarrass AGW sceptic and Telegraph blogger James Delinpole for example was false and really quite pathetic given they claimed to have interviewed him for three hours and this was apparently their knock-out blow.
James Delinpole does appear to be a bit of a prat, but I don't think Paul Nurse did his side of the debate any favours if this was as ignorant as they could Delingpole look after a three hour interview.
He was asked 'if a dear relative was suffering from a fatal disease, would he opt for the "consensus" treatment recommended by doctors, or advice to drink more orange juice offered by a fringe maverick quack?'
This is a bullshit analogy for many reasons. Let's ignore the fact that a fatal disease by definition cannot be cured - Primarily this is a bullshit analogy because Climate science is in it's infancy and medicine isn't.
If we apply the same conditions to the illness question when medicine was in it's infancy the patient would have been quite right to ignore the consensus treatment as that would probably have been a course of leeches.
And what about climate scientist Stephen Schneider who actually was diagnosed with cancer and did refuse the consensus treatment because he was sceptical about it's efficacy. Meanwhile Dr Schneider refuses to recognise the doubts of those sceptical of research in his own field. How does Paul Nurse reconcile those two contradictory opinions?
Comparing maverick quacks in medicine to perfectly well respected scientists who question AGW is an impoverished argument and contrary to everything science and the Royal Society should stand for. It's also a classic sign of insecurity.
I'm quite sure they know the wheels are falling off their little bandwagon, but they're going to ride it until it collapses anyway along with the public's respect for any forms of science. Thanks to the IPCC and people like Paul Nurse the general public will eventually lose their trust in all branches of science including medicine. The dangers of this are obvious.
Bastards.
8 comments:
I've not seen it but surely it couldn’t be worse than that Channel 4 garbage in 2007?
There's hysteria on both sides of the argument and certainty on neither. The bottom line is it's a very complex subject - you would literally have to spend months studying 1000s of scientific papers to get even a base understanding of what's going on. That's why fag packet journalists consistently get it wrong.
Maybe Paul Nurse and Jeremy Clarkson should have a naked wrestling match to decide who's right? ;-)
But it's the AGW people who are making the extraordinary claims. They're the ones who are declaring without a doubt that man is responsible for Global warming so the onus of proof is on them to provide the extraordinary proof to back those claims up, not on sceptics to disprove it.
If you believe in God that's an extraordinary claim too, so the onus is on you to prove God's existence, not for atheists to disprove it.
The way to prove AGW is not to make data unavailable, and cherry pick results to suit the theory and declare that anyone who doubts your theories is a NON-BELIEVER or DENIER like it's some form of blasphemy.
Paul Nurse takes the Dr Venckman from Ghostbusters approach to debating: "Back off man, I'm a scientist." Forgive me if that's not quite good enough.
Bloody hell Rich, you attack Paul Nurse's analogy on one hand and then come up with another ropey analogy (belief in climate change = belief in something extraordinary = belief in God)
How about IPCC = overwhelming majority = a bit like the Nazi party in the 1930s ;-)
Paul Nurse also made the point that the scientific evidence should be made publically available. In fact the whole episode was a bit like Ben Goldacre's bad science column, Science need better PR.
The overwhelming evidence is that the mean global surface temperature increased 0.74 during the 20th century, if that continues then it will get to a point where we cannot ignore climate change, we will be paying through the nose for it.
It's not a ropey analogy. I'm simply saying if you want people to believe something of enormous magnitude the onus is on you to provide the proof, not for everyone else to disprove it.
If you don't think how we all came into being is of enormous magnitude you must be very hard to please.
You're confusing "over whelming evidence" with what the IPCC says. The IPCC is a politically driven body set up by the UN, not a scientific one.
The President is an engineer not a climatologist. And the "consensus" they always refer to does not actually exist if you do a bit of research rather than just accepting what the BBC tells you.
Even the small number of actual scientists still prepared to work with the IPCC have very little climatologists amongst their number.
Most of them are scientists of other fields.. like Nurse who is a biologist/geneticist.
Ah Rich, it's a ropey analogy because there is not and (probably) never will be any evidence of god, it's a always going to be a question of faith; I could believe in a club sammich orbiting around Mars and no one would be able to prove or disprove it. But you can reproduce the greenhouse effect with carbon dioxide in a laboratory. You can't reproduce god without the aid of vast quantities of LSD.
There is however a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change, and the climate models are unfortunately being proved correct.
http://scholarsandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/anti-global-heating-claims-a-reasonably-thorough-debunking/#m19
As for consensus, well I've yet to find evidence of a climate change conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, but if you find any, let me know. There are however, a lot of websites spouting climate change “zombie arguments”: arguments which survive to be raised again, for eternity, no matter how many times they are shot down. There’s a huge list of them at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/index/#Responses
With refutations. And written by proper climate scientists. Blah blah blah, can we talk about Mexican weather girls now?
You misunderstand my point mate. I wasn't suggesting you can never prove AGW.
In your initial comment you said there's hysteria on both sides and certainty on neither.
I was simply pointing out that it's the AGW people who have to be certain not the sceptics.
The onus of proof is on the people offering the theory. And with such a theory with such profound consequences as AGW the proof the IPCC offers is far from conclusive.
Even if there weren't any counter-theories that doesn't make AGW any less likely. There are lots of things in science that can't be explained yet.
The peer review system is far from the robust self-policing system it used to stand for.
It doesn't mean anything if the "peers" all come from the same side of the debate.
The idea that the consensus view includes "thousands" of scientists is quite simply bullshit. It does not exist.
We're obviously going to have to agree to disagree on this one so I'll end here before we start repeating ourselves.
If you wanted to talk about Mexican weather girls you should have done so in the first place, this is my blog remember, you came here I didn't come to you :-)
Do we know each other by the way?
OK Rich, I'm going to leave it here because we're only going to end up arguing about sematics, i.e. what is a consensus and how many scientists does it take to work it out with a pencil. And it's been done before:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/there-is-no-consensus.php
Great blog btw, can't remember how I found it, may have been on the cf forum? Now where are those weathergirls ;-)
From the Independent in 2000 quoting IPCC prognostications
"... the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia [the epicentre of global warming research], within a few years winter snowfall will become 'a very rare and exciting event'. Children just aren't going to know what snow is."
Fast forward 2010 we've just had the coldest December on records. They're now saying AGW is actually responsible for this heavy snowfall too!
This is why people are sceptic and why it's unwarranted to label sceptics as deniers.
You can't say one thing and when it clearly becomes evident you were wrong, just say something else.
At least you can't if you want people to take you seriously.
The end.
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