What drives Sir Paul Nurse?

Sir Paul Nurse is an expert on the genetics of yeast and is also the current President of the Royal Society  in Britain.  He is a poor boy made good.  His birth was illegitimate at a time when that mattered.  With his background it would have been difficult for him to gain acceptance in the upper echelons of British society but a good brain has got him a long way.

And I suggest that his difficult background helps explain why a geneticist has become a furious defender of global warming.  He is striving for acceptance and global warming is an accepted view among most of his colleagues and contacts.  Scientific integrity takes a second place to his personal ambitions.

The meticulous Steve McIntyre has a very detailed and extensive summary of correspondence with Nurse about global warming and there is much there that is discreditable to Nurse.  I reproduce just the last part of it to give a flavor of the way Nurse is consumed with hostility to skeptics.  At the point where the excerpt starts the book "Nullius in Verba" by Montford is being discussed.  "Nullius in Verba" ("Don't trust words") is the historic motto of the Royal Society and the book is a critique of where the Royal Society is today.

Given the negligible empirical support for the global warming prophecy, I think that most of those who  support it must be suspected of personal motives but the motives of Nurse would seem particularly clear.  The last paragraph below, in particular,  depicts a classic case of psychological insecurity.

I write of course as a much published psychologist, specializing in political psychology, but there are nonetheless grounds on which my analysis of Nurse could be held to be improper.  I may note however that derogatory analyses of conservatives by Leftist psychologists go back at least to 1950 so I write with much  precedent before me

If one re-examines Nurse’s New Scientist editorial, it seems to be exactly what Montford described: “an attack on what [Nurse] saw as ‘anti-science’ attitudes in the US Republican party”. I happen to share Nurse’s disdain on many points, though I thought that his concern that U.S. scientists were about to decamp for the UK, China and India was somewhat overheated.

However, given that there were many able Americans speaking out on the matter, one might wonder whether this was an issue that actually required the attention of the President of the UK Royal Society or whether Nurse’s priorities might be better directed towards scientific misunderstandings by UK politicians, such as, arguably, their belief in wind and solar policies.

Nor did Montford’s sentence (which seems to be accurate on its face) imply in any way that either Montford or the GWPF endorsed the views that Nurse criticized in his New Scientist editorial.

Nurse had originally alleged that the GWPF had published “named personal attacks on four successive Presidents of the Royal Society”. When challenged, Nurse failed to produce any evidence, instead claiming that Nullius in Verba gave “support for absurd anti-science views”, an unfounded allegation that GWPF denied and which turns out to be founded on nothing more than the above Montford sentence.

Nurse’s thin-skinned and consistently incorrect characterization of Nullius in Verba reminds me of Lucia’s warning about Gavin Schmidt (to which I referred recently in connection with mischaracterization by CRU and Schmidt himself):

    "I might suggest that you are assuming that people asked the questions Gavin says they asked, and that Gavin’s answer to their questions is adequate because Gavin tells us his answer is adequate."

It also seems to me that there is also a tinge of Gleick and Lewandowsky in Nurse’s remarks and ill-informed attitude towards skeptics. The term “anti-science” occurred in Gleick’s forgery and was one of the words that tipped Mosher that it was a forgery. And rather than Nurse’s New Scientist editorial suggesting output from a “policy quango”, as Montford had suggested, it seems far more similar to an editorial that might have come from the US National Center for Science Education, to which Gleick had been nominated as a director in January 2012 (though the nomination was withdrawn after Gleick’s fraud and forgery were revealed.)

In respect to the vituperativeness of Nurse’s response both to the sentence in paragraph 121 (page 36) of Nullius in Verba and to Lawson’s letter, one is also reminded of another Lucia suggestion:  "put on your big boy pants."

Indeed, according to an incident recounted in Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile (discussed at Bishop Hill here), it seems that Nurse believes that he wears extra-special big boy pants. Taleb writes:

    "As I was writing this book, I overheard on a British Air flight a gentleman explain to the flight attendant less than two seconds into the conversation (meant to be about whether he liked cream and sugar in his coffee) that he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine “and Physiology” in addition to being the president of a famous monarchal academy. The flight attendant did not know what the Nobel was, but was polite, so he kept repeating “the Nobel Prize” hoping that she would wake up from her ignorance. I turned around and recognized him, and the character suddenly deflated. As the saying goes, it is hardest to be a great man to one’s chambermaid."

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).