BBC Horizon: Science Under Attack, one hour in six parts
Mr Paul Nurse - sorry, we abolished monarchy in 1918 so let me kindly avoid all the aristocratic rubbish in the titles - received the 2001 Nobel prize in medicine (for cell cycle) and became the President of the Royal Society. In the video above, he shows that he is an excellent speaker.
The content of the video is outrageous, however. The guy promotes the climate fearmongering to the queen of all sciences. The program is filled with hundreds of absolutely incredible statements such as
Anthropogenic climate change is already affecting every aspect of our lives.If he were both honest and able to make elementary observations of the reality, he would know that the "climate change" hasn't affected a single tiny piece of shit so far, and it probably won't do so in the coming decades, either. Everyone who fails to see - or admit - this self-evident fact is either a complete idiot or a self-serving crook and liar.
For Paul Nurse, it is a combination of both. Medicine attracts people with some knowledge of science but their IQ is still 16 points below that of the physicists - a whole standard deviation. It's not just about the IQ: Mr Nurse, has someone told you that you just have no idea about the physical sciences whatsoever and you should try to maximally use your freeedom to shut your mouth?
Needless to say, the corruption cause is equally important. Climate fearmongering has become an important and "scientific" channel to steal billions of taxpayers' pounds, dollars, and euros, and he is the very president of one of the top institutions that is responsible for this disgraceful robbery.
Paul Nurse meets Fred Singer in a café. A nice encounter whose outcome is that Nurse presents Singer's summary of the key climate processes in an incomprehensible way and he claims that it is Fred Singer, and not the AGW crooks, who are cherry-picking. If I will ever have good enough evidence that something like that is being planned by a person who invites me to a restaurant, I will make sure there is poison in his coffee.
Nurse says that one shouldn't believe cherry-picked information just because the conclusion is convenient and he goes to an unknown average "also scientist" who cherry-picks some effects that aren't correlated with the temperature to argue that the natural phenomena don't matter for the climate change. Moreover, the guy (arguably deliberately) confuses the question of the rising CO2 with the question of the CO2 effect on the temperature. Paul Nurse likes the political consequences of this self-evident bogus claim so he believes it. Try to read the first sentence of the paragraph now.
Your hypocrisy is just stunning, f*cking Sir, or whatever you want to be called in your distasteful smugness.
Another portion of the program, in part 3, is dedicated to the ClimateGate, especially the "hide the decline" e-mail. It's correctly explained that it was about the splicing of the graphs from different sources to create a false impression that the trees indicate that there has been an unusual warming. However, Mr Nurse doesn't seem to acknowledge that it was an extremely serious scientific misconduct. The trees don't show anything unusual. Of course, one can always glue different graphs to produce discontinuities in the trend but this isn't honest science.
Other liberals said that the scandal wasn't a serious one, Mr Nurse tells us, directly showing that the "Global Warming Panic Explained" was right on the money. Mr Nurse is not worried about the validity of all the amazing things he says about the climate; his only interest is how to brainwash the public and, indeed, the scientists themselves. His whole program is about this very point.
Nurse also visits James Delingpole's house - in a seemingly friendly way. James Delingpole is quickly described as a leader of the denial campaign who just copied a denial title from a denial website. Shockingly enough, however, James is allowed to consistently explain why the "hiding of the decline" was a scientifically unacceptable procedure. He is even allowed to say that the AGW movement is mostly a political agenda - about the control over people.
Science is not about the consensus, James argues, and he is caught partly unprepared to Nurse's analogy with the cancer patient who listens to the majority of the doctors. Skeptics are not the kooks who believe that cancer is cured by squirrels. Well, the most relevant observation is that the individual doctors are - hopefully most of the time - driven by the actual arguments rather than by the desire to achieve or preserve consensus. That makes a lot of difference.
In another scene, they show two animated scenes - the observed and computer-modeled global cloudiness. The details obviously disagree - and the cloudiness in the regions often differs by a factor of two which corresponds to a several degrees of error in the temperature if the discrepancy in cloudiness is kept for a long time. But they produce lots of bogus statements that the agreement is stunning. Are you just blind, Mr Nurse?
The skeptical climate blogosphere is presented as an incoherent arena for conspiracy theories rather than reasoned arguments. That's very interesting because the skeptical climate blogs became the only arena at which larger groups of people actually evaluate the evidence impartially.
Nurse asks Delingpole whether he only builds on peer-reviewed literature and Delingpole very crisply explains that the scandals have showed that the peer review has been corrupted. Nurse ignores these important words and worships peer review instead.
He then compares climate skeptics to the people who believe that HIV doesn't cause AIDS; and that environmental healthy food is better than various medicine procedures. The only problem is that Nurse's analogy is upside down: it's the alarmists who are the "environmentalists", who believe that the bodies or the Earth evolve according to man-made decisions rather than natural factors; it's the alarmists who join the anti-medicine activists and the opponents of genetically modified food (who are also insanely mentioned as "counterparts" of the climate skeptics) in a broader network of obsessed anti-industrial Luddites.
Crazily enough, Nurse claims that climate skeptics, much like "HIV/AIDS deniers", confuse the cause and the effect. This fallacy is the very main particular fallacy that Al Gore did in his movie - and some of his followers still claim to be unable to understand that the CO2 changes in the glaciation cycles followed the temperature changes.
Quite generally, Nurse seems to pick the most characteristic logical fallacies and other systemic mistakes that the climate alarmists do all the time and he asserts that it's the climate skeptics who do these mistakes. It's just incredible.
