The Royal Society: too little, too late
 

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ja...ttle-too-late/

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: May 29th, 2010

The other night I had the great pleasure of dinner with Professor Bob Carter. He told me that when
he goes on speaking tours, there's only one question he ever gets asked to which he is unable to
provide a satisfactory answer. It goes something like this:

"Thank you Professor Carter, that was all very interesting. But please can you tell me why you
expect us to take your opinion seriously when it is contradicted by most of the world's leading
scientific organisations, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society?"

Funnily enough, I replied, that's exactly what I'm planning to write a book about. "How did a
scientific theory so feeble and ill-supported by any hard evidence yet become the dominant
political idea of our age with so much support from people who really ought to know better?"

One thing's for certain. When the history of this outbreak of mass hysteria comes to be written,
few organisations will emerge with more egg on their face than the standing joke that is the Royal
Society.

For years it has acted as cheerleader for the AGW lobby but has now been forced to backtrack after
complaints from 43 of its members that it has been exaggerating the scientific certainty about the
existence of ManBearPig. Its current president Lord Rees is trying to salvage what dignity he can
be making out that this rethink of its position was always part of the plan:

Lord Rees said the new guide has been planned for some time but was given "added impetus by
concerns raised by a small group of fellows".

"Nothing in recent developments has changed or weakened the underpinning science of climate
change. In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people
are asking questions, indeed even within the Fellowship of the Society there are differing views.
Our guide will be based on expert views backed up by sound scientific evidence," he said.

However he denied accusations that the national academy of sciences has ever stifled debate or
that the case for man made global warming is in doubt.

To which the only possible answer is: Yeah, right.

It wasn't always this way. For the three centuries after its foundation in 1660, the Royal Society
was the world's pre-eminent scientific institution. Its members and presidents included: Sir
Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir
Hans Sloane, Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, Joseph Lister, Ernest Rutherford.

Its alumni's achievements included designing St Pauls Cathedral, laying groundwork for classical
mechanics, discovering law of gravity and three laws of motion, coining word "cell" for basic unit
of life, Hooke's law of elasticity, Boyle's law, inventing drinking chocolate, creating basis of
Natural History Museum's collection, introducing numerous plant species to the Western World,
helping popularise evolutionary theory, devising antiseptic surgery, pioneering nuclear physics.

So what went wrong?

Nigel Calder blames its politicisation sometime in the 1960s. He quotes this "advertisement" which
for two centuries was printed in its house journal Philosophical Transactions:

. it is an established rule of the Society, to which they will always
adhere, never to give their opinion, as a Body, upon any subject,
either of Nature or Art, that comes before them.

Yet under the presidencies of Lord May and Lord Rees, it has lost all credibility by abandoning
objectivity and nailing its colours to the mast of the (now rapidly sinking ship) RMS Climatitanic.

In 2005, as Gerald Warner reminds us, it produced its "A guide to facts and fictions about climate
change", "which denounced 12 "misleading arguments" which today, post Climategate and the
subsequent emboldening of sceptical scientists to speak out, look far from misleading."

Large chunks of this, Bishop Hill has suggested, seem to bear the grubby fingerprints of Sir John
Houghton, the fanatical warmist who was formerly head of the Met Office and the Hadley Centre and
who was the first chairman of the IPCC scientific working group responsible for giving the AGW
scare its official kick-start.

The Royal Society is also the alma-mater (sort of: if ex-press officers count) of rabid pit bull
Bob Ward, now spokesman for the warmist Grantham Institute, who can often be heard on the wireless
getting very cross with people who don't believe in ManBearPig. (An increasingly tough job, given
that this now means almost everyone).

Tags: Bob Ward, Lord May, Lord Rees, Royal Society