Horizon (1964–…): Season 42, Episode 13 - A War on Science - full transcript
Please join me at 8 o'clock, for So we are descending deep into the
basement here. My name is Paul Nurse. I have just
taken over as President of the Royal Society, Britain's academy of
science. This is where all the books are held. The wonderful
archives here bear witness to over 350 years of scientific
achievements. This is Newton's great work on the laws of motion.
And battles. This is the great book of course, The Origin Of Species.
find this an inspiring place for the challenges that science now
faces. I think that today there is a new kind of battle. It is not
just a clash of ideas, but whether people actually trust science. One
of the most vocal arguments currently raging is about climate
science. Many people seem unconvinced that we are warming our
planet through the emission of greenhouse gasses. Are you saying
the whole community, or a majority of the community, of climate
scientists are skewing their data? Is that what you are claiming? And
trust in other scientific theories has also been eroded, such as the
safety of vaccines, or that HIV causes AIDs. You wouldn't see
yourself as a denialist? No, not at all. I don't even know that they
say I am in denial of. There have been angry protests against the use
of genetically modified foods. is time for us to say no, we don't
want it, we don't want their new technology. Science created our
modern world. So I want to understand why science appears to
be under such attack? And whether For me, becoming president of the
Royal Society has been the culmination of a lifetime's
fascination with science, and my attempts to answer questions about
the world around me. I have been interested in science all my life.
It started when I was at primary school. I had a long walk to school
and I used to look at all the plants and the birds and insects. I
got interested in natural history. I used to wonder about things, like
why when plants are growing in the shade are the leaves bigger? It's
the sort of things an eight or nine year old would ask. 50 years later,
I am still trying to answer questions about the most basic
processes of life. Probably what my lab is best known for is
discovering the control which regulates cell division, which will
lead hopefully to better understanding diseases like cancer,
and maybe a cure. Ten years ago, I shared a Nobel Prize for this work.
It is fantastic, I'm really privileged. I have been doing this
for 40 years. I sometimes wonder why people are paying me.
But away from my lab, I have witnessed hostilities towards some
key areas of science. There is one issue that is of particular
importance today... The question of It is a subject that polarises
live. With so much at stake, scientists are rightly held to
account. But some of my colleagues feel not under scrutiny, but under
attack. I was pretty disturbed by a letter I read a few months ago by a
magazine called Science - that is one of the most prestigious
journals in science - from 255 members, if I remember rightly, of
the NAAS, the Academy of Science in the United States, a very
prestigious organisation. These 255 members had written a letter really
expressing concern about how climate scientists were being
treated. The letter was about climate change and the integrity of
science. Two sentences really stood out. "We are deeply disturbed by
the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general,
and on climate scientists in particular". That is pretty strong
stuff. And then a sentence towards the end: "We also call for an end
to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our
colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, and the
outright lies being spread about them". This is as tough as anything
I have read in a magazine like Science.
What worries me is not just that scientists feel under attack, but
that many people think these attacks may be intellectually
justified. Recent polls suggest that nearly half of Americans, and
a more than a third of the British, believe climate change is being
exaggerated. It is this gap between scientists and the public that I
want to understand. Are the public right not to trust science, or is
there something else that is not working? As always, the best place
to start is with the scientific evidence. Good morning, how are
you? I want to go to the space centre, OK? I'll put my stuff in
I have come to Washington to visit one of the most respected
scientific organisations in the world, NASA. I am really rather
excited about coming to NASA. I have always been interested in
astronomy and space. The strange thing about NASA is not only is it
looking out into outer space, like with the Hubble telescope, but it
spends a lot of time looking down at the earth and monitoring climate.
Satellites are very good at monitoring the changes in earth. I
don't think we recognise that. Most of what NASA is doing is looking
down, not looking up! If you can park here, I can get out
there. That would be great. NASA is a major centre for climate research.
It spends more than $2 billion a year studying the climate. I have
come to meet Dr Bob Bindshadler to see where and how they get their
information. Here, we can really visualise a lot of data sets and
this is the one I really like because it shows us how scientists
are getting their data. I mean, NASA does a lot of stuff in the
cosmos, but we have half the satellites just looking at the
earth, just looking down at the earth. Every 90 minutes, every one
of these satellites orbits the earth and collects data, sometimes
in a wide swathe, sometimes in a narrow swathe. This is our bread
and butter, this is where all our information comes from. So, how
many of these satellites are there up there? There are about 16, 17,
18 satellites up there right now, just that NASA operates. There are
at least as many from all the other space agencies. The European Space
Agency, India operates satellites, Japan does, Canada does. So if you
put that full constellation on there it would be so busy it would
look like New York streets in rush hour. But that is a gigantic amount
of information being collected? It's huge, it's terabytes. It is
petabytes of data, every day, coming down.
NASA is just one of many organisations collecting global
climate evidence. This information has helped create a view of how our
planet's temperature has changed in the recent past. Paul, I want to
show you this science on a sphere, a fantastic way of looking at data.
Recognise that world. You can just walk around here, see the clouds
moving round. It's an absolutely fantastic way of looking at data.
So, I guess the real question is, is this planet warming up?
planet is warming up, the climate is changing. Just over the last 50
years, it has been about three quarters of a degree Celsius, which
doesn't sound like a whole lot. And we have been able to calculate that
over the next 50 years it is going to warm at least another three
quarters of a degree if we do nothing else, if we don't even
continue to modify the climate. temperatures are rising. But what
is really at dispute is the cause of that change, whether it's simply
a natural temperature fluctuation. There have been times when the
earth has been warmer than it is today. Less ice, higher sea level
and colder than today, with much more ice and lower sea level. But
an important thing to remember is that back in those times, climate
changed very gradually and now it is changing really fast. That is a
very important characteristic of climate change that we are living
through right now. The pace of that change.
NASA's data is not the only evidence that our climate is
warming rapidly, and that we're causing the change. There is also
several decades of research from scientists across the globe. The
extent of the data suggests we should have a lot of confidence in
this idea. Yet, this evidence is clearly not convincing many of the
wider public. And those who are sceptical turn to other scientists.
There is no scientific evidence that greenhouse warming is
occurring, or if it is that it would lead to disaster. We see no
evidence in the climate record that the increase in CO2, which is real,
will make any appreciable difference in the climate.
Professor Fred Singer has a reputation as one of the world's
most prominent and prolific climate sceptics. He is an atmospheric
physicist who has been battling against the consensus view for over
20 years. Professor Singer's views influence sceptics all over the
world. Dr Singer, I'm Paul Nurse. Very pleased to meet you. Delighted
to meet you finally. Come and sit down. Can we have an earl grey tea
with milk? Here's your tea. Thank you very much. They really don't
know how to do tea in New York. water isn't hot enough. God, I hate
that. We suffer that. The first thing I wanted to ask Professor
Singer was his views on global temperatures. You are happy, or
agree, that there has been warming in the last century? Some warming.
Under one degree, 0.7 degrees, I think I've read. Something of that
sort. Something of that sort. There is warming and it has been cooling,
and then it has been warming again. It is not a clear record.
But where he differs from the view of the vast majority of climate
scientists is the cause of this warming. He does not believe that
humans are responsible. He attributes it to natural forces.
I am of the opinion that the major natural effect comes from the sun,
and specifically from variations in it where it is called solar
activity. That is not the total radiation from the sun, but it is
the emission from the sun we call coronal ejections, which produce
the solar wind. And the solar wind is a particle streaming from the
sun, it pervades interplanetary space and can effect a situation
near the earth. A record of this solar activity can
be read from deposits in caves by measuring the level of a type of
carbon atom created by the sun's rays.
The good evidence we have comes from stalagmites in caves, but it
is published in Nature. But there is a correlation, so if you look at
these estimates of solar activity and the temperature of the globe,
they're well correlated. You cannot say the globe. This refers to the
local measurements in a cave on the Arabian peninsular.
In our conversation, Professor Singer drew on this stalagmite
evidence to support his conclusions about solar activity. But it is
important to consider how this specific finding fits into the
wider body of evidence. An important aspect of science is it
makes sense as a whole. Just imagine this field of grasses and
plants that we see here, imagine it as a scientific field, imagine that
we're looking at a lot of ideas or a lot of facts or observations. You
have to look at each one of them and make sure they make sense
together. It's no good cherry- picking one part of it and just
basing your argument on that. Just look at this tree here. It attracts
your attention, but if you just concentrate on that and ignore
everything else then you're not going to make progress, you're not
going to make sense of what's going In the climate debate, some have
placed a lot of emphasis on the evidence of solar activity, but
this data needs to be looked at in the context of all research. You
cannot ignore the majority of available evidence, in favour of
something you would prefer to be true. Data that we are not warming
our planet needs to be placed in the context of the greater body of
evidence that we are, such as that gathered by NASA.
When you actually look at the data, the sun doesn't turn out to be that
important. On the historical scale, the paleoclimate scale, the sun is
important. We know the sun is driving these long cycles. But if
you look at the small variations in the solar radiation and the
variations in the climate data that we have now, with these data sets,
they don't match up. So there's just no doubt that the sun is not a
primary factor driving the climate change that we're living through
right now. The scientific consensus is, of
course, that the changes we are seeing are caused by emissions of
carbon into the atmosphere. But given the complexity of the climate
system, how can we be sure that humans are to blame for this?
We know how much fossil fuel we take out of the ground. We know how
much we sell, we know how much we burn, and that is a huge amount of
carbon dioxide, it's about 7GT per year right now. And is that enough
to explain... Natural causes only can produce, there's volcanoes
popping off and things like that and coming out of the ocean, only
about 1GT per year, so there's just no question that human activity is
producing a massively large proportion of the carbon dioxide.
So seven times more? That's right. Why do some people say that isn't
the case? I don't know. I think they get worried about the details
of the temperature record, or the carbon dioxide record. But again,
you need to stand back and look at the big picture and there really is
no controversy then if you do that. In this market place of ideas, who
do you believe? If you're not a scientist, then ultimately it's a
question of trust. Despite the weight of evidence in its favour,
the theory of man-made climate change is not bringing a large
section of the public with it. I think some clues as to why may be
found at the University of East Anglia, the scene of Climategate, a
story that broke in November 2009. The work of one of the world's
leading climate research units at the University of East Anglia is to
Thousands of emails were taken from the computer at the Climatic
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online.
According to the headlines, the emails contained one of the worst
scientific outrages of all time. Just look here, Christopher Booker
in the Sunday Telegraph. "This is the worst scientific scandal of our
generation". Here, the Daily Express. "Now there are lies,
damned lies and global warming," implying that global warming is
nothing but lies and a sham. Here from The Spectator, an article by
James Delingpole watching the Climategate scandal. Here he says
in the first sentence, this is the greatest scientific scandal in the
history of the world. At the heart of the scandal was one email in
particular. Correspondence from the head of CRU, Dr Phil Jones, talked
about using Mike's nature trick to hide the decline'. This seemed
proof climate scientists were tricking the world into thinking
our use of fossil fuels is warming the planet. The news immediately
went international. The timing couldn't have been worse. It was
just three weeks before the UN Climate Change Convention, what
many saw as the world's best hope to reduce carbon emissions before
it was too late. And at the centre of it all was one man, Dr Phil
Jones, head of CRU. The unit's headquarters are tiny,
yet Dr Jones and his colleagues have had a truly global impact.
These are German books. These are Japanese books. There's American
books. CRUs library holds centuries' worth
of temperature data collected from instruments in every corner of the
globe. To look further back in history, climate researchers have
to extrapolate information from the rings in ancient pieces of wood.
This is a measurement from a tree from the Andes in Argentina. This
is a bog oak from Germany. It has been preserved in the peat bogs.
How old is that piece of wood? is about 3,000 to 4,000 years old.
Tree rings have been shown to be a good way of measuring ancient
temperatures. And they have mostly matched instrumental measurements
since the advent of thermometers. However, after about 1960, some
tree ring data stopped fitting real temperatures so well. The cause of
this isn't known. When Dr Jones was asked by the World Meteorological
Organisation to prepare a graph of how temperatures had changed over
the past 1,000 years, he had to decide how to deal with this
divergence between the data sets. He decided to use the direct
measurements of temperature change from thermometers and instruments,
rather than indirect data from the tree rings, to cover the period
from 1960. It was this data splicing, and his email referring
to it as a trick', that formed the crux of Climategate.
organisation wanted a relatively simple diagram for their particular
audience. What we started off doing was the three series, with the
instrumental temperatures on the end, clearly differentiated from
the tree ring series, but they thought that was too complicated to
explain to their audience. So what we did was just to add them on and
to bring them up to the present. And, as I say, this was a World
Meteorological Organisation statement, it had hardly any
coverage in the media at the time and had virtually no coverage for
the next ten years, until the release of the emails. Why do you
think so much fuss was made over the emails and this graph rather
than the peer reviewed science? think that it's a number of the
climate change sceptics, doubters, deniers, whatever you want to call
them, just wanted to use these emails for their own purposes to
cast doubt on the basic science. The basic science is in the peer
reviewed literature and I wish more people would read that than read
the emails. As well as the emails, much
criticism of Dr Jones centred on his reluctance to hand over data.
The team at CRU had been receiving requests under the Freedom of
Information Act, also known as FOI requests, for access to their
scientific data. Well, we started getting some
requests in about 2007 and we responded to those. These are
Freedom of Information Requests? Yes, they were specifically for the
basic station temperature data and also for the locations of the
stations. The situation got a bit worse in July 2009, when we got 60
requests over a weekend. Over one weekend? Over one weekend, where
there was clearly some sort of co- ordination between... Was that from
different people? Different people, but there was clearly some co-
ordination of the requests, because they each asked for five countries,
in alphabetical order. I thought at the time it was just to waste our
time, in order to deal with these requests and maybe to get the data
together. So this is an interesting dilemma that we have here, really,
because obviously science is based on open access to data, but
obviously you can also be disrupted by having, if you like, more
legalistic attempts to get data, or simply trying to waste people's
time. How do you balance that? sometimes we get requests and
sometimes not through FOI, just from other scientists. We point
them in the right direction as to where you might be able to get the
data. But when it became more sort of through the FOI, it really then
became clear that it was some sort of harassment.
This event raises questions about the openness of scientific research.
Dr Jones and his team clearly felt persecuted. However, scientists do
have to be open with their data. It might be useful to think about
the human genome project where similar issues came up about a
decade ago. There was clear discussion about this, and in the
public genome sequencing laboratories a real commitment,
dedication to getting that data out to the public as soon as possible,
and I think that maybe there is maybe something to be learnt from
that for climate science. There were at least four
independent reviews of the work of CRU. The reports found there was no
evidence of dishonesty'. They said splicing the temperature data
wasn't 'misleading' but this technique should 'have been made
plain'. They said generally the unit should have been more open.
But, crucially, they found no evidence of any 'deliberate
scientific malpractice'. This seems to have been the
greatest scientific scandal that never really took place. I mean, it
just doesn't make sense to me at all why it got blown out of
proportion. It makes me wonder whether us scientists are not well
suited for dealing with situations like this and we perhaps let them
run out of our control. I mean, the world is changing, the digital
world, with blogs and tweets and so on. We're perhaps not able to deal
with that, to cope with a sort of maelstrom of media attention that
fell upon UEA during this event. I think there's something to be
learnt here, we've got to think about how we defend our science,
how we project ourselves to the public.
In the end, the integrity of climate science was not faulted,
but somehow a leak of some 10 year old emails did real damage to its
reputation. In all the clamour, the science seems to have been left
behind. I have come to meet James
Delingpole, one of those who led the campaign. I want to tell you a
story about something extraordinary that happened to me late last year.
It was an ordinary Thursday morning and I was sitting at my desk, and
into my lap fell the story that would change my life and quite
possibly save western civilisation from the greatest threat it has
ever known. That story? Climategate. Sir Paul. Hello, you must be James.
Pleased to meet you. Do call me Paul, though.
James Delingpole is an online journalist for the Telegraph
newspaper. He picked up the leaked emails from a denier's website, and
ran with it on his Telegraph blog under the name Climategate. That
week, his page got an extraordinary 1.5 million hits.
Well, the suggestion of the scientists in the climate gate
emails was that you hide the decline, using Mike's nature trick,
which I think is some sort of fudge. This very fact of splicing two
different sorts of data together on a graph, apples and oranges,
scientists don't do that, they don't try to hide the decline by
using Mike's nature trick. What they do is they admit to the flaws
in their data, and don't try and disguise that fact.
James told me the independent enquiries into what happened at CRU
were a whitewash'. He also said scientists fall too easily into a
'consensus' and fail to be critical enough of the data.
I've been following this Climategate story very closely for
the last year. And I think that what is being done in the name of
science, the consensus is essentially advancing a political
agenda, and that political agenda has much more to do with control,
with governments intruding further into our lives Consensus can be
used like a dirty word. Consensus is actually the position of the
experts at the time, and if it's working well, it doesn't always
work well, but if it's working well, they evaluate the evidence, you
make your reputation in science by actually overturning that, so
there's a lot of pressure to do it. But if over the years, the
consensus doesn't move, you have to wonder, is the argument, is the
evidence against the consensus good enough? Science has never been
about consensus and this is one of the most despicable things about Al
Gore's so called consensus. Consensus is not science. I want to
give an analogy, which, in a different situation, say you had
cancer and you went to be treated, there would be a consensual
position on your treatment, and it is very likely that you would
follow that consensual treatment, because you would trust the
clinical scientists there. Now the analogy is that you could say, well,
I've done my research into it and I disagree with that consensual
position, but that would be a very unusual position for you to take.
And I think, sometimes, the consensual position can be
criticised, when in fact, it is mostly likely, to be the correct
I think it's, I think... Look, I think it's very easy to caricature
the position of climate change sceptics as the sort of people who
don't look left and right when crossing the road, or who think
that quack, you know, the quack cure that they have invented for
cancer is just as valid as the one chosen by the medical establishment.
I think it is something altogether different. And I do slightly resent
the way that you're bringing in that analogy. For many, the
Climategate debacle is the embodiment of our current
relationship with science. The anger it generated reveals the
tensions, and the widely divergent views, that exist on both sides of
And through all this noise, people are left to try and make sense of
it all. Good morning. Could I have at times and an independent,
please? I think the public have got every right to feel confused about
the reporting of science in the media. Let me just show you some
reports of different scientific issues. Starting with Climategate,
the Daily Mail reporting this issue concludes in its headline,
"Secretive and unhelpful, but scientist in Climategate storm
still gets his job back". Completely different tone about
this news item in the Guardian. "Climategate scientists cleared of
manipulating data on global warming". It is difficult to
imagine it is reporting the same thing. But it is not just reporting
news events to do with science, but the science itself. Let's have a
look at what the Daily Express is saying here, for example, about the
effect of the sun on global warming. They have their provocative
headline, "What a climate con." but specifically they say here that the
sun is the major cause of temperature variation and sun spots
in particular. If we now look at the Independent, almost the same
day we have, "Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists". I
mean, what is going on here? This is just reporting science coming to
completely different conclusions. It's not surprising that the public
are confused reading all of this different stuff. There are these
lurid headlines, and there are political opinions filtering
through which probably reflects editorial policy within the
newspapers. And we get an unholy mix of the media and the politics.
And it's distorting the proper reporting of science. And that is a
real danger for us if science is to Somehow science has got to get
I wonder if part of the problem lies with communicating the
complexities of science, what it is we understand what it is we don't
We're mainly taught science at school as if it's made up of
immutable facts. Such as Einstein's theory of relativity or Newton's
Hi, how are you doing? And it was seeing these theories
being translated into the real world that first got me hooked as a
child. One of the most exciting things was seeing Sputnik 2,
1957/58. It was going across the streets of London. I was so excited.
I was in my pyjamas. And I ran out and saw this satellite going across
the sky. Everyone thought I was crazy of course. But that was the
beginning of the space age and I was there. I want to enthuse a new
generation with the optimistic belief that science is a force for
progress. However at the cutting edge of science, where I work, the
truth is not always so obvious. We often have to deal with uncertainty
in science but I think it helps to think of uncertainty in two
different sorts of ways. There's uncertainty that often happens at
the beginning of a research project. And we don't know what's going on.
And by testing and doing experiments, things get more and
more certain. Knowledge becomes less and less tentative. And
there's another sort of uncertainty which is more probabilistic like
for example if we treat somebody for a certain disease, we don't
know whether that individual will be cured or not. But we do know
probabilistically over a hundred individuals that 20 will and 80
won't for example. And that Thanks to decades of research and
experimentation, our knowledge about the fundamentals of climate
But there are uncertainties that won't go away. Especially in our
ability to predict the future, where scientists can only talk in
terms of probabilities. Does this uncertainty mean that the science
Some of the biological problems I study are complicated and so is
Clouds, ice, chemicals in the air, plants, and the sun all interact
with one another to affect our Clouds are one of the most
significant of these, yet also one of the most complex. Depending on
their height and make-up they can either warm or cool the planet. So
it's difficult to represent them correctly in the climate models.
But if the scientists don't get them right, then quantifying what
the temperatures might be in the However, through enormous amounts
of data collection and research climate scientists are becoming
more certain in their knowledge of Back at NASA, Bob Bindschadler
showed me just how much progress has been made. Just to emphasize
how good these models are. Side by side comparison. Here is data,
actual observations. And this is what the computer is generating.
Predicting what should be happening. And you look at one, you look at
the other, these major systems it's there. These cumulus clouds popping
up in the tropics. And this is all happening in the same time scale.
But one is just built on observation, what we actually see
and below that is data and the modelling that that produces.
Exactly, so we're just testing a model here. We've got data, weve
got a model. How good do they, do the model predictions match the
data. And your eye will just tell you the answers it's very... It's
reflecting swirling here and then they swirl up there and then little
puffs there and little puffs there. So, so even that kind of detail
about clouds, models are getting it right now. And you know, visually I
think this is just so stunning because seeing is believing.
Climate science is sort of moving from more tentative knowledge to
more certain knowledge. It still has uncertainties but they're
getting less as time goes on. will always be a little bit of
uncertainty because there are some processes that we don't fully
understand. But we measure scientific progress in our ability
to reduce the uncertainties and by that measure we're making
extraordinary progress. All the information we have today helps us
predict our future climate, but the more we learn the more complex the
climate system becomes. This doesn't mean the science is flawed
or that we shouldn't act but there may be a problem in the way those
uncertainties are communicated to the public. Scientists may not be
willing enough to publically discuss the uncertainties in their
science or to fully engage with those that disagree with them, and
Making this film has made me think about the place of science in the
modern world, and whether we scientists are keeping pace. Free
and open access to information means our voices are no longer the
only ones people hear. What I think is changing in the way that we're
talking about science in the public sphere, is the fact that now almost
anybody can say what they like on the blogosphere and this is getting
read and I'm really used in my science which I've done for 30-40
years for a much more cooler approach. When I read these blogs I
mean they're full of righteousness, full of zealousness. They're
clearly trying to convince you strongly of their point of view.
They cherry pick data. They don't seem to be always completely
consistent. And what I get the sense of is that they don't
actually try and put a reasoned argument here. There's a case here
on the left there's a case here on the right. It's always very
strongly on one side. Searches on the internet do not differentiate
between thoroughly researched evidence and un-sourced
uncorroborated assertion. Conspiracy theories compete on
level-terms with peer reviewed science. In this new world of
information overload we look to people we trust to find those
answers. And these days it's not necessarily the scientists. One
question I would ask as someone who has done quite a lot of scientific
publishing, are you looking mainly at peer reviewed material or non-
peer reviewed? Peer reviewed being material that in principle, and
flawed that it is, cos I know it can be flawed, that has been looked
at by other scientists and the case said, well there is an argument
here worth publishing? One of the main things to have emerged from
the climate gate emails, was that the peer review process has been
perhaps irredeemably corrupted. Um, what I believe in now, and I think,
I think we are seeing a shift in the way science is conducted. And
at least transmitted to the outside, to the wider world is a process
called peer to peer review. The internet is changing everything.
What it means is that ideas which were previously only able to be
circulated in the seats of academia, in private, in papers, read by few
people, can now be instantly read on the internet. And assessed by
thousands and thousands of other scientists and people with
scientific backgrounds and people like me who haven't got a
scientific background, but you know are interested. Just back to the
evidence again though. Because so you, we get, obviously there's a
source of evidence through, through the internet. Books, primary
publications probably is not your thing? It is not my job to sit down
and read peer reviewed papers because I simply haven't got the
time, I haven't got the scientific expertise, what I rely on is people
who have got the time and the expertise to do it and write about
it and interpret it. I am an interpreter of interpretations.
a working scientist, I've learnt that peer review is very important
to make science credible. The authority science can claim comes
from evidence and experiment and an attitude of mind that seeks to test
its theories to destruction. Scepticism is really important. We
are often plagued with self doubt. I always tell my students and post
doctoral workers, be the worse enemy of your own idea. Always
challenge it, always test it. I think things are a little different
when you have a denialist or an extreme sceptic. They're convinced
that they know what's going on and they only look for data that
supports that position. They're not really engaging in the scientific
There is a fine line between healthy scepticism, which is a
fundamental part of the scientific process, and denial which can stop
the science moving on. But the difference is crucial. Denial is
not just a feature of the debate over climate change. People deny
the evidence in favour of many things like certain vaccines or
that HIV causes AIDS. I want to understand better how people reach
this state of mind. Hi, are you Tony? Pleased to meet
you. I was taking a routine physical. My doctor said I've got
some bad news for you, you're HIV positive. My name is Sparkles. Have
you been here before? Yes. It's my first time here.
My doctor said, "Look, if you don't take these drugs you're going to be
dead in two years." So he handed me the prescriptions. I walked out the
door and on the way to the car I passed by a trash can, ripped them
up and threw them in and never went back. That was 13 years ago and
that was the last time I went to a Tony Lance does not believe a virus
causes AIDS. And rather than take anti-retrovirals he treats himself
This is not a vanilla flavour. More like a tartness. Hey. There is
actually active culture right, so it's got a little bit of...
There is such an overwhelming body of evidence that HIV causes AIDS, I
really want to understand how Tony has reached his opinion. I came to
the conclusion that much of what is called AIDS at least as it appears
in gay men, is the result of severe dysregulation of internal micro
flora. And the causes of that. That's all the microbes growing in
the gut. Exactly. We have in our gut, a very complex and rich eco
system. Microbes living in a symbiotic relationship with us.
They directly affect our immune system. Our uptake of nutrients.
And it occurred to me after many many years of reading and self
analysis and observing the gay community that there really are
some very good reasons why certain subsets of gay men would have
internal micro flora that are abnormal. To get right down to
brass tacks, I think HIV is a marker for immune dysfunction as
opposed to being a cause. I think immune dysfunction actually
proceeds HIV positivity and makes it possible.
Holding these views puts Tony in a very small minority.
What is it like psychologically for you and for people who think like
you to be on the outside? It's isolating. One of the labels tossed
at me and others like me is a denialist, and that's actually kind
of hurtful to tell you the truth. You wouldn't see yourself as a
denialist? No, not at all. I don't even know that they say I'm in
denial of. I mean, I've lost many scores of friends to AIDS so I'm
certainly not in denial of the actual illness. I just view the
I found that discussion with Tony really interesting. I mean I'm
completely mainstream about HIV AIDS. AIDS is caused by the HIV
retrovirus no question about that. He doubts that, he's sceptical
about whether it's causal, you could say that he denies that it's
causal. But he's at the end of the spectrum where you can have a
conversation with him. As a scientist, I find Tony's views hard
However I think there may be a link between how he approaches the
evidence for the causes of AIDS and how some climate sceptics may look
at the causes of global warming. Problems arise when you're studying
complex data and trying to Understanding what causes what in
complex systems in like biology, that I study, or climate science is
really difficult. Let me illustrate this here. Imagine that each of
these poles are different events. Events A, B and C and we have time
running up here on the floor. Event A causes event B. Event A also
causes event C. But if you're a scientist you don't know anything
about event A and you're simply studying B and C, what you'll see
is after a certain period of time you will see B and then always or
nearly always you will see C a certain amount of time afterwards.
It would be a natural consequence to think that B will cause C when
it's absolutely not the case. I'll think of a concrete example, for
example smoking and lung cancer. Let's imagine event A is smoking,
and event B is yellow teeth, that occurs after a certain amount of
time. And let's imagine event C is lung cancer. You could perhaps
imagine as a scientist that you observe yellow teeth and then you
observe lung cancer and then maybe yellow teeth causes lung cancer.
That's obviously nonsense but if you didn't know about smoking you
could be led into that erroneous conclusion. That's the problem with
complexity, that's the problem with There's an overwhelming body of
evidence that says we are warming our planet, but complexity allows
for confusion and for alternative theories to develop. The only
solution is too look at all the evidence as a whole. I think some
extreme sceptics decide what to think first, and then cherry pick
the data to support their case. We scientists have to acknowledge we
now operate in a world where point of view not peer review holds sway.
I think part of the problem may be past controversies, where
mainstream science has failed to There is one such subject where the
research has to be carried out under strict security because
Isolated in a remote corner of the country, a highly contentious
scientific trial is being conducted. We're not protecting the public
from them. We're protecting them from the anti-GM activists who have
been very keen to disrupt GM trials. This field is home to a large
experiment in Genetically Modified food. Professor Jonathan Jones is
working to create a new kind of potato that would be resistant to a
mould called late blight. Alongside standard potatoes, he also planted
two GM varieties, and waited to see what would happen. This is perfect
blight weather actually. If you're a late blight pathogen you would be
very very happy today. Potato blight is a disease that caused the
Irish potato famine. It causes ?3.5 billion a year of losses in
potatoes and tomatoes. It's a fungus-like organism but it makes
spores that can blow around. We didn't inoculate this. It blew in
from somebody else's field probably 20 to 30 miles away. It can rip
through a crop in a week. The trial is at an early stage, but the GM
varieties seem to be standing up to the blight much better than the
standard ones. Farmers actually spend about ?500 a hectare
controlling this disease so if you have 100 hectares of potatoes
that's ?50,000 out the door for spraying 15 times a year to control
the disease. Clearly it would be better if we didn't have to do all
that spraying. What we're trying to do here is get genes into the
potatoes that would mitigate the need for all that spraying.
it's this manipulation of genes that's the source of contention.
Critics have objected on several grounds, from safety issues to
environmental concerns. It's time for us to say no, we don't want it,
we don't want their new technology, it doesn't benefit us, it doesn't
benefit the environment, in fact it threatens us and the environment.
The GM debate once again raises the question of public trust in science.
There's a gap between the fears of some sections of the public, and
the opinion of scientists that what they are doing is both useful and
safe. I think my primary emotion is bemusement. Where are they coming
from? What is going on in their heads that they feel so strongly
that this must be campaigned They often assert this is a failed
If it's failed why do 14 million farmers plant 134 million hectares
of it? They do so because it works, farmers are not stupid. There seems
to be a mutual misunderstanding from both the scientists and the
public. The controversy surrounding GM was something I really wanted to
understand. I went and talked to members of the public to find out
why they were so against it. One thing that came up very often was
that they were against eating food with genes in it. That's something
that would never occur to a scientist because a scientist
obviously knows all food has genes in it. But why should a member of
the public know that? What had happened here, is that we
scientists hadn't gone out there and asked what bothered the public,
we hadn't had dialogue with them. Scientists had forgotten that we
don't operate in an isolated bubble. We cannot take the public for
granted. We have to talk to them, we have to communicate the issues.
We have to earn their trust if science really is going to benefit
Over the next few years, every country on the globe faces tough
decisions over what to do about climate change. I've been thinking
how scientists can win back the confidence we're going to need if
we're going to make those choices wisely. Quite a grand door. To a
rather workman-like area, we're going down to the basement. Oh wow!
Before I started my Presidency of the Royal Society, Keith Moore, the
head Librarian, wanted to take me on a tour of the archives to give
me a glimpse of some of the jewels they contain. Here we hold some of
the genuinely rare materials from the book stock. Being surrounded by
the products of so many brilliant minds is quite a humbling
experience. These are the minutes of the meetings. All the notes!
this goes right back to the first meeting of the RS Really? What year
is this? 1660. So here we have the memorandum on 28 November 1660.
First meeting of the organisation. Look at that. Not even called the
Royal Society. Is that Wren? That's Christopher Wren. Robert Boyle,
they're all here! You know this has made me feel a bit star struck here
I have to say. I'm here in the royal society, 350 years of an
endeavour which is build on a respect for observation, respect
for data, respect for experiment trust no one trust only what the
experiment and data tell you, we have to continue to use that
approach if we are to solve It's become clear to me that if we
hold to these ideals of trust in evidence then we have a
responsibility to publically argue our case. Because in this
conflicted and volatile debate scientists are not the only voices
When a scientific issue has important outcomes for society,
then the politics becomes increasingly more important. So if
we look at this issue of climate change that is particularly
significant because that has affects on how we manage our
economy and manage our politics. And so this has become a crucially
political matter and we can see that by the way the forces are
being lined up on both sides. What really is required here is a focus
on the science keeping the politics and keeping the ideologies out of
the way. One thing you can't get away without seeing is Sir Isaac
Newton. Is this Principia? This is his great work of the laws of
motion. This is the book that laid foundation for gravity. That's
right. This was a standard text for scientists for about 200 years, it
was really not until Einstein came along that it people began to
seriously revalue the way the universe worked. I need to touch
it! Yes, do. Maybe just finally here. This is the great book of
course, the origin of species. was presented to the society.
at it. From the awful. Rather overwhelmed by the librarian.
nasty 1980s biro! Earning trust requires more than
just focusing on the science, we have to communicate it effectively
too. Scientists have got to get out there. They have to be open about
everything that they do. They do have to talk to the media even if
it does sometimes put their reputation at doubt because if we
basement here. My name is Paul Nurse. I have just
taken over as President of the Royal Society, Britain's academy of
science. This is where all the books are held. The wonderful
archives here bear witness to over 350 years of scientific
achievements. This is Newton's great work on the laws of motion.
And battles. This is the great book of course, The Origin Of Species.
find this an inspiring place for the challenges that science now
faces. I think that today there is a new kind of battle. It is not
just a clash of ideas, but whether people actually trust science. One
of the most vocal arguments currently raging is about climate
science. Many people seem unconvinced that we are warming our
planet through the emission of greenhouse gasses. Are you saying
the whole community, or a majority of the community, of climate
scientists are skewing their data? Is that what you are claiming? And
trust in other scientific theories has also been eroded, such as the
safety of vaccines, or that HIV causes AIDs. You wouldn't see
yourself as a denialist? No, not at all. I don't even know that they
say I am in denial of. There have been angry protests against the use
of genetically modified foods. is time for us to say no, we don't
want it, we don't want their new technology. Science created our
modern world. So I want to understand why science appears to
be under such attack? And whether For me, becoming president of the
Royal Society has been the culmination of a lifetime's
fascination with science, and my attempts to answer questions about
the world around me. I have been interested in science all my life.
It started when I was at primary school. I had a long walk to school
and I used to look at all the plants and the birds and insects. I
got interested in natural history. I used to wonder about things, like
why when plants are growing in the shade are the leaves bigger? It's
the sort of things an eight or nine year old would ask. 50 years later,
I am still trying to answer questions about the most basic
processes of life. Probably what my lab is best known for is
discovering the control which regulates cell division, which will
lead hopefully to better understanding diseases like cancer,
and maybe a cure. Ten years ago, I shared a Nobel Prize for this work.
It is fantastic, I'm really privileged. I have been doing this
for 40 years. I sometimes wonder why people are paying me.
But away from my lab, I have witnessed hostilities towards some
key areas of science. There is one issue that is of particular
importance today... The question of It is a subject that polarises
live. With so much at stake, scientists are rightly held to
account. But some of my colleagues feel not under scrutiny, but under
attack. I was pretty disturbed by a letter I read a few months ago by a
magazine called Science - that is one of the most prestigious
journals in science - from 255 members, if I remember rightly, of
the NAAS, the Academy of Science in the United States, a very
prestigious organisation. These 255 members had written a letter really
expressing concern about how climate scientists were being
treated. The letter was about climate change and the integrity of
science. Two sentences really stood out. "We are deeply disturbed by
the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general,
and on climate scientists in particular". That is pretty strong
stuff. And then a sentence towards the end: "We also call for an end
to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our
colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, and the
outright lies being spread about them". This is as tough as anything
I have read in a magazine like Science.
What worries me is not just that scientists feel under attack, but
that many people think these attacks may be intellectually
justified. Recent polls suggest that nearly half of Americans, and
a more than a third of the British, believe climate change is being
exaggerated. It is this gap between scientists and the public that I
want to understand. Are the public right not to trust science, or is
there something else that is not working? As always, the best place
to start is with the scientific evidence. Good morning, how are
you? I want to go to the space centre, OK? I'll put my stuff in
I have come to Washington to visit one of the most respected
scientific organisations in the world, NASA. I am really rather
excited about coming to NASA. I have always been interested in
astronomy and space. The strange thing about NASA is not only is it
looking out into outer space, like with the Hubble telescope, but it
spends a lot of time looking down at the earth and monitoring climate.
Satellites are very good at monitoring the changes in earth. I
don't think we recognise that. Most of what NASA is doing is looking
down, not looking up! If you can park here, I can get out
there. That would be great. NASA is a major centre for climate research.
It spends more than $2 billion a year studying the climate. I have
come to meet Dr Bob Bindshadler to see where and how they get their
information. Here, we can really visualise a lot of data sets and
this is the one I really like because it shows us how scientists
are getting their data. I mean, NASA does a lot of stuff in the
cosmos, but we have half the satellites just looking at the
earth, just looking down at the earth. Every 90 minutes, every one
of these satellites orbits the earth and collects data, sometimes
in a wide swathe, sometimes in a narrow swathe. This is our bread
and butter, this is where all our information comes from. So, how
many of these satellites are there up there? There are about 16, 17,
18 satellites up there right now, just that NASA operates. There are
at least as many from all the other space agencies. The European Space
Agency, India operates satellites, Japan does, Canada does. So if you
put that full constellation on there it would be so busy it would
look like New York streets in rush hour. But that is a gigantic amount
of information being collected? It's huge, it's terabytes. It is
petabytes of data, every day, coming down.
NASA is just one of many organisations collecting global
climate evidence. This information has helped create a view of how our
planet's temperature has changed in the recent past. Paul, I want to
show you this science on a sphere, a fantastic way of looking at data.
Recognise that world. You can just walk around here, see the clouds
moving round. It's an absolutely fantastic way of looking at data.
So, I guess the real question is, is this planet warming up?
planet is warming up, the climate is changing. Just over the last 50
years, it has been about three quarters of a degree Celsius, which
doesn't sound like a whole lot. And we have been able to calculate that
over the next 50 years it is going to warm at least another three
quarters of a degree if we do nothing else, if we don't even
continue to modify the climate. temperatures are rising. But what
is really at dispute is the cause of that change, whether it's simply
a natural temperature fluctuation. There have been times when the
earth has been warmer than it is today. Less ice, higher sea level
and colder than today, with much more ice and lower sea level. But
an important thing to remember is that back in those times, climate
changed very gradually and now it is changing really fast. That is a
very important characteristic of climate change that we are living
through right now. The pace of that change.
NASA's data is not the only evidence that our climate is
warming rapidly, and that we're causing the change. There is also
several decades of research from scientists across the globe. The
extent of the data suggests we should have a lot of confidence in
this idea. Yet, this evidence is clearly not convincing many of the
wider public. And those who are sceptical turn to other scientists.
There is no scientific evidence that greenhouse warming is
occurring, or if it is that it would lead to disaster. We see no
evidence in the climate record that the increase in CO2, which is real,
will make any appreciable difference in the climate.
Professor Fred Singer has a reputation as one of the world's
most prominent and prolific climate sceptics. He is an atmospheric
physicist who has been battling against the consensus view for over
20 years. Professor Singer's views influence sceptics all over the
world. Dr Singer, I'm Paul Nurse. Very pleased to meet you. Delighted
to meet you finally. Come and sit down. Can we have an earl grey tea
with milk? Here's your tea. Thank you very much. They really don't
know how to do tea in New York. water isn't hot enough. God, I hate
that. We suffer that. The first thing I wanted to ask Professor
Singer was his views on global temperatures. You are happy, or
agree, that there has been warming in the last century? Some warming.
Under one degree, 0.7 degrees, I think I've read. Something of that
sort. Something of that sort. There is warming and it has been cooling,
and then it has been warming again. It is not a clear record.
But where he differs from the view of the vast majority of climate
scientists is the cause of this warming. He does not believe that
humans are responsible. He attributes it to natural forces.
I am of the opinion that the major natural effect comes from the sun,
and specifically from variations in it where it is called solar
activity. That is not the total radiation from the sun, but it is
the emission from the sun we call coronal ejections, which produce
the solar wind. And the solar wind is a particle streaming from the
sun, it pervades interplanetary space and can effect a situation
near the earth. A record of this solar activity can
be read from deposits in caves by measuring the level of a type of
carbon atom created by the sun's rays.
The good evidence we have comes from stalagmites in caves, but it
is published in Nature. But there is a correlation, so if you look at
these estimates of solar activity and the temperature of the globe,
they're well correlated. You cannot say the globe. This refers to the
local measurements in a cave on the Arabian peninsular.
In our conversation, Professor Singer drew on this stalagmite
evidence to support his conclusions about solar activity. But it is
important to consider how this specific finding fits into the
wider body of evidence. An important aspect of science is it
makes sense as a whole. Just imagine this field of grasses and
plants that we see here, imagine it as a scientific field, imagine that
we're looking at a lot of ideas or a lot of facts or observations. You
have to look at each one of them and make sure they make sense
together. It's no good cherry- picking one part of it and just
basing your argument on that. Just look at this tree here. It attracts
your attention, but if you just concentrate on that and ignore
everything else then you're not going to make progress, you're not
going to make sense of what's going In the climate debate, some have
placed a lot of emphasis on the evidence of solar activity, but
this data needs to be looked at in the context of all research. You
cannot ignore the majority of available evidence, in favour of
something you would prefer to be true. Data that we are not warming
our planet needs to be placed in the context of the greater body of
evidence that we are, such as that gathered by NASA.
When you actually look at the data, the sun doesn't turn out to be that
important. On the historical scale, the paleoclimate scale, the sun is
important. We know the sun is driving these long cycles. But if
you look at the small variations in the solar radiation and the
variations in the climate data that we have now, with these data sets,
they don't match up. So there's just no doubt that the sun is not a
primary factor driving the climate change that we're living through
right now. The scientific consensus is, of
course, that the changes we are seeing are caused by emissions of
carbon into the atmosphere. But given the complexity of the climate
system, how can we be sure that humans are to blame for this?
We know how much fossil fuel we take out of the ground. We know how
much we sell, we know how much we burn, and that is a huge amount of
carbon dioxide, it's about 7GT per year right now. And is that enough
to explain... Natural causes only can produce, there's volcanoes
popping off and things like that and coming out of the ocean, only
about 1GT per year, so there's just no question that human activity is
producing a massively large proportion of the carbon dioxide.
So seven times more? That's right. Why do some people say that isn't
the case? I don't know. I think they get worried about the details
of the temperature record, or the carbon dioxide record. But again,
you need to stand back and look at the big picture and there really is
no controversy then if you do that. In this market place of ideas, who
do you believe? If you're not a scientist, then ultimately it's a
question of trust. Despite the weight of evidence in its favour,
the theory of man-made climate change is not bringing a large
section of the public with it. I think some clues as to why may be
found at the University of East Anglia, the scene of Climategate, a
story that broke in November 2009. The work of one of the world's
leading climate research units at the University of East Anglia is to
Thousands of emails were taken from the computer at the Climatic
Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and posted online.
According to the headlines, the emails contained one of the worst
scientific outrages of all time. Just look here, Christopher Booker
in the Sunday Telegraph. "This is the worst scientific scandal of our
generation". Here, the Daily Express. "Now there are lies,
damned lies and global warming," implying that global warming is
nothing but lies and a sham. Here from The Spectator, an article by
James Delingpole watching the Climategate scandal. Here he says
in the first sentence, this is the greatest scientific scandal in the
history of the world. At the heart of the scandal was one email in
particular. Correspondence from the head of CRU, Dr Phil Jones, talked
about using Mike's nature trick to hide the decline'. This seemed
proof climate scientists were tricking the world into thinking
our use of fossil fuels is warming the planet. The news immediately
went international. The timing couldn't have been worse. It was
just three weeks before the UN Climate Change Convention, what
many saw as the world's best hope to reduce carbon emissions before
it was too late. And at the centre of it all was one man, Dr Phil
Jones, head of CRU. The unit's headquarters are tiny,
yet Dr Jones and his colleagues have had a truly global impact.
These are German books. These are Japanese books. There's American
books. CRUs library holds centuries' worth
of temperature data collected from instruments in every corner of the
globe. To look further back in history, climate researchers have
to extrapolate information from the rings in ancient pieces of wood.
This is a measurement from a tree from the Andes in Argentina. This
is a bog oak from Germany. It has been preserved in the peat bogs.
How old is that piece of wood? is about 3,000 to 4,000 years old.
Tree rings have been shown to be a good way of measuring ancient
temperatures. And they have mostly matched instrumental measurements
since the advent of thermometers. However, after about 1960, some
tree ring data stopped fitting real temperatures so well. The cause of
this isn't known. When Dr Jones was asked by the World Meteorological
Organisation to prepare a graph of how temperatures had changed over
the past 1,000 years, he had to decide how to deal with this
divergence between the data sets. He decided to use the direct
measurements of temperature change from thermometers and instruments,
rather than indirect data from the tree rings, to cover the period
from 1960. It was this data splicing, and his email referring
to it as a trick', that formed the crux of Climategate.
organisation wanted a relatively simple diagram for their particular
audience. What we started off doing was the three series, with the
instrumental temperatures on the end, clearly differentiated from
the tree ring series, but they thought that was too complicated to
explain to their audience. So what we did was just to add them on and
to bring them up to the present. And, as I say, this was a World
Meteorological Organisation statement, it had hardly any
coverage in the media at the time and had virtually no coverage for
the next ten years, until the release of the emails. Why do you
think so much fuss was made over the emails and this graph rather
than the peer reviewed science? think that it's a number of the
climate change sceptics, doubters, deniers, whatever you want to call
them, just wanted to use these emails for their own purposes to
cast doubt on the basic science. The basic science is in the peer
reviewed literature and I wish more people would read that than read
the emails. As well as the emails, much
criticism of Dr Jones centred on his reluctance to hand over data.
The team at CRU had been receiving requests under the Freedom of
Information Act, also known as FOI requests, for access to their
scientific data. Well, we started getting some
requests in about 2007 and we responded to those. These are
Freedom of Information Requests? Yes, they were specifically for the
basic station temperature data and also for the locations of the
stations. The situation got a bit worse in July 2009, when we got 60
requests over a weekend. Over one weekend? Over one weekend, where
there was clearly some sort of co- ordination between... Was that from
different people? Different people, but there was clearly some co-
ordination of the requests, because they each asked for five countries,
in alphabetical order. I thought at the time it was just to waste our
time, in order to deal with these requests and maybe to get the data
together. So this is an interesting dilemma that we have here, really,
because obviously science is based on open access to data, but
obviously you can also be disrupted by having, if you like, more
legalistic attempts to get data, or simply trying to waste people's
time. How do you balance that? sometimes we get requests and
sometimes not through FOI, just from other scientists. We point
them in the right direction as to where you might be able to get the
data. But when it became more sort of through the FOI, it really then
became clear that it was some sort of harassment.
This event raises questions about the openness of scientific research.
Dr Jones and his team clearly felt persecuted. However, scientists do
have to be open with their data. It might be useful to think about
the human genome project where similar issues came up about a
decade ago. There was clear discussion about this, and in the
public genome sequencing laboratories a real commitment,
dedication to getting that data out to the public as soon as possible,
and I think that maybe there is maybe something to be learnt from
that for climate science. There were at least four
independent reviews of the work of CRU. The reports found there was no
evidence of dishonesty'. They said splicing the temperature data
wasn't 'misleading' but this technique should 'have been made
plain'. They said generally the unit should have been more open.
But, crucially, they found no evidence of any 'deliberate
scientific malpractice'. This seems to have been the
greatest scientific scandal that never really took place. I mean, it
just doesn't make sense to me at all why it got blown out of
proportion. It makes me wonder whether us scientists are not well
suited for dealing with situations like this and we perhaps let them
run out of our control. I mean, the world is changing, the digital
world, with blogs and tweets and so on. We're perhaps not able to deal
with that, to cope with a sort of maelstrom of media attention that
fell upon UEA during this event. I think there's something to be
learnt here, we've got to think about how we defend our science,
how we project ourselves to the public.
In the end, the integrity of climate science was not faulted,
but somehow a leak of some 10 year old emails did real damage to its
reputation. In all the clamour, the science seems to have been left
behind. I have come to meet James
Delingpole, one of those who led the campaign. I want to tell you a
story about something extraordinary that happened to me late last year.
It was an ordinary Thursday morning and I was sitting at my desk, and
into my lap fell the story that would change my life and quite
possibly save western civilisation from the greatest threat it has
ever known. That story? Climategate. Sir Paul. Hello, you must be James.
Pleased to meet you. Do call me Paul, though.
James Delingpole is an online journalist for the Telegraph
newspaper. He picked up the leaked emails from a denier's website, and
ran with it on his Telegraph blog under the name Climategate. That
week, his page got an extraordinary 1.5 million hits.
Well, the suggestion of the scientists in the climate gate
emails was that you hide the decline, using Mike's nature trick,
which I think is some sort of fudge. This very fact of splicing two
different sorts of data together on a graph, apples and oranges,
scientists don't do that, they don't try to hide the decline by
using Mike's nature trick. What they do is they admit to the flaws
in their data, and don't try and disguise that fact.
James told me the independent enquiries into what happened at CRU
were a whitewash'. He also said scientists fall too easily into a
'consensus' and fail to be critical enough of the data.
I've been following this Climategate story very closely for
the last year. And I think that what is being done in the name of
science, the consensus is essentially advancing a political
agenda, and that political agenda has much more to do with control,
with governments intruding further into our lives Consensus can be
used like a dirty word. Consensus is actually the position of the
experts at the time, and if it's working well, it doesn't always
work well, but if it's working well, they evaluate the evidence, you
make your reputation in science by actually overturning that, so
there's a lot of pressure to do it. But if over the years, the
consensus doesn't move, you have to wonder, is the argument, is the
evidence against the consensus good enough? Science has never been
about consensus and this is one of the most despicable things about Al
Gore's so called consensus. Consensus is not science. I want to
give an analogy, which, in a different situation, say you had
cancer and you went to be treated, there would be a consensual
position on your treatment, and it is very likely that you would
follow that consensual treatment, because you would trust the
clinical scientists there. Now the analogy is that you could say, well,
I've done my research into it and I disagree with that consensual
position, but that would be a very unusual position for you to take.
And I think, sometimes, the consensual position can be
criticised, when in fact, it is mostly likely, to be the correct
I think it's, I think... Look, I think it's very easy to caricature
the position of climate change sceptics as the sort of people who
don't look left and right when crossing the road, or who think
that quack, you know, the quack cure that they have invented for
cancer is just as valid as the one chosen by the medical establishment.
I think it is something altogether different. And I do slightly resent
the way that you're bringing in that analogy. For many, the
Climategate debacle is the embodiment of our current
relationship with science. The anger it generated reveals the
tensions, and the widely divergent views, that exist on both sides of
And through all this noise, people are left to try and make sense of
it all. Good morning. Could I have at times and an independent,
please? I think the public have got every right to feel confused about
the reporting of science in the media. Let me just show you some
reports of different scientific issues. Starting with Climategate,
the Daily Mail reporting this issue concludes in its headline,
"Secretive and unhelpful, but scientist in Climategate storm
still gets his job back". Completely different tone about
this news item in the Guardian. "Climategate scientists cleared of
manipulating data on global warming". It is difficult to
imagine it is reporting the same thing. But it is not just reporting
news events to do with science, but the science itself. Let's have a
look at what the Daily Express is saying here, for example, about the
effect of the sun on global warming. They have their provocative
headline, "What a climate con." but specifically they say here that the
sun is the major cause of temperature variation and sun spots
in particular. If we now look at the Independent, almost the same
day we have, "Sunspots do not cause climate change, say scientists". I
mean, what is going on here? This is just reporting science coming to
completely different conclusions. It's not surprising that the public
are confused reading all of this different stuff. There are these
lurid headlines, and there are political opinions filtering
through which probably reflects editorial policy within the
newspapers. And we get an unholy mix of the media and the politics.
And it's distorting the proper reporting of science. And that is a
real danger for us if science is to Somehow science has got to get
I wonder if part of the problem lies with communicating the
complexities of science, what it is we understand what it is we don't
We're mainly taught science at school as if it's made up of
immutable facts. Such as Einstein's theory of relativity or Newton's
Hi, how are you doing? And it was seeing these theories
being translated into the real world that first got me hooked as a
child. One of the most exciting things was seeing Sputnik 2,
1957/58. It was going across the streets of London. I was so excited.
I was in my pyjamas. And I ran out and saw this satellite going across
the sky. Everyone thought I was crazy of course. But that was the
beginning of the space age and I was there. I want to enthuse a new
generation with the optimistic belief that science is a force for
progress. However at the cutting edge of science, where I work, the
truth is not always so obvious. We often have to deal with uncertainty
in science but I think it helps to think of uncertainty in two
different sorts of ways. There's uncertainty that often happens at
the beginning of a research project. And we don't know what's going on.
And by testing and doing experiments, things get more and
more certain. Knowledge becomes less and less tentative. And
there's another sort of uncertainty which is more probabilistic like
for example if we treat somebody for a certain disease, we don't
know whether that individual will be cured or not. But we do know
probabilistically over a hundred individuals that 20 will and 80
won't for example. And that Thanks to decades of research and
experimentation, our knowledge about the fundamentals of climate
But there are uncertainties that won't go away. Especially in our
ability to predict the future, where scientists can only talk in
terms of probabilities. Does this uncertainty mean that the science
Some of the biological problems I study are complicated and so is
Clouds, ice, chemicals in the air, plants, and the sun all interact
with one another to affect our Clouds are one of the most
significant of these, yet also one of the most complex. Depending on
their height and make-up they can either warm or cool the planet. So
it's difficult to represent them correctly in the climate models.
But if the scientists don't get them right, then quantifying what
the temperatures might be in the However, through enormous amounts
of data collection and research climate scientists are becoming
more certain in their knowledge of Back at NASA, Bob Bindschadler
showed me just how much progress has been made. Just to emphasize
how good these models are. Side by side comparison. Here is data,
actual observations. And this is what the computer is generating.
Predicting what should be happening. And you look at one, you look at
the other, these major systems it's there. These cumulus clouds popping
up in the tropics. And this is all happening in the same time scale.
But one is just built on observation, what we actually see
and below that is data and the modelling that that produces.
Exactly, so we're just testing a model here. We've got data, weve
got a model. How good do they, do the model predictions match the
data. And your eye will just tell you the answers it's very... It's
reflecting swirling here and then they swirl up there and then little
puffs there and little puffs there. So, so even that kind of detail
about clouds, models are getting it right now. And you know, visually I
think this is just so stunning because seeing is believing.
Climate science is sort of moving from more tentative knowledge to
more certain knowledge. It still has uncertainties but they're
getting less as time goes on. will always be a little bit of
uncertainty because there are some processes that we don't fully
understand. But we measure scientific progress in our ability
to reduce the uncertainties and by that measure we're making
extraordinary progress. All the information we have today helps us
predict our future climate, but the more we learn the more complex the
climate system becomes. This doesn't mean the science is flawed
or that we shouldn't act but there may be a problem in the way those
uncertainties are communicated to the public. Scientists may not be
willing enough to publically discuss the uncertainties in their
science or to fully engage with those that disagree with them, and
Making this film has made me think about the place of science in the
modern world, and whether we scientists are keeping pace. Free
and open access to information means our voices are no longer the
only ones people hear. What I think is changing in the way that we're
talking about science in the public sphere, is the fact that now almost
anybody can say what they like on the blogosphere and this is getting
read and I'm really used in my science which I've done for 30-40
years for a much more cooler approach. When I read these blogs I
mean they're full of righteousness, full of zealousness. They're
clearly trying to convince you strongly of their point of view.
They cherry pick data. They don't seem to be always completely
consistent. And what I get the sense of is that they don't
actually try and put a reasoned argument here. There's a case here
on the left there's a case here on the right. It's always very
strongly on one side. Searches on the internet do not differentiate
between thoroughly researched evidence and un-sourced
uncorroborated assertion. Conspiracy theories compete on
level-terms with peer reviewed science. In this new world of
information overload we look to people we trust to find those
answers. And these days it's not necessarily the scientists. One
question I would ask as someone who has done quite a lot of scientific
publishing, are you looking mainly at peer reviewed material or non-
peer reviewed? Peer reviewed being material that in principle, and
flawed that it is, cos I know it can be flawed, that has been looked
at by other scientists and the case said, well there is an argument
here worth publishing? One of the main things to have emerged from
the climate gate emails, was that the peer review process has been
perhaps irredeemably corrupted. Um, what I believe in now, and I think,
I think we are seeing a shift in the way science is conducted. And
at least transmitted to the outside, to the wider world is a process
called peer to peer review. The internet is changing everything.
What it means is that ideas which were previously only able to be
circulated in the seats of academia, in private, in papers, read by few
people, can now be instantly read on the internet. And assessed by
thousands and thousands of other scientists and people with
scientific backgrounds and people like me who haven't got a
scientific background, but you know are interested. Just back to the
evidence again though. Because so you, we get, obviously there's a
source of evidence through, through the internet. Books, primary
publications probably is not your thing? It is not my job to sit down
and read peer reviewed papers because I simply haven't got the
time, I haven't got the scientific expertise, what I rely on is people
who have got the time and the expertise to do it and write about
it and interpret it. I am an interpreter of interpretations.
a working scientist, I've learnt that peer review is very important
to make science credible. The authority science can claim comes
from evidence and experiment and an attitude of mind that seeks to test
its theories to destruction. Scepticism is really important. We
are often plagued with self doubt. I always tell my students and post
doctoral workers, be the worse enemy of your own idea. Always
challenge it, always test it. I think things are a little different
when you have a denialist or an extreme sceptic. They're convinced
that they know what's going on and they only look for data that
supports that position. They're not really engaging in the scientific
There is a fine line between healthy scepticism, which is a
fundamental part of the scientific process, and denial which can stop
the science moving on. But the difference is crucial. Denial is
not just a feature of the debate over climate change. People deny
the evidence in favour of many things like certain vaccines or
that HIV causes AIDS. I want to understand better how people reach
this state of mind. Hi, are you Tony? Pleased to meet
you. I was taking a routine physical. My doctor said I've got
some bad news for you, you're HIV positive. My name is Sparkles. Have
you been here before? Yes. It's my first time here.
My doctor said, "Look, if you don't take these drugs you're going to be
dead in two years." So he handed me the prescriptions. I walked out the
door and on the way to the car I passed by a trash can, ripped them
up and threw them in and never went back. That was 13 years ago and
that was the last time I went to a Tony Lance does not believe a virus
causes AIDS. And rather than take anti-retrovirals he treats himself
This is not a vanilla flavour. More like a tartness. Hey. There is
actually active culture right, so it's got a little bit of...
There is such an overwhelming body of evidence that HIV causes AIDS, I
really want to understand how Tony has reached his opinion. I came to
the conclusion that much of what is called AIDS at least as it appears
in gay men, is the result of severe dysregulation of internal micro
flora. And the causes of that. That's all the microbes growing in
the gut. Exactly. We have in our gut, a very complex and rich eco
system. Microbes living in a symbiotic relationship with us.
They directly affect our immune system. Our uptake of nutrients.
And it occurred to me after many many years of reading and self
analysis and observing the gay community that there really are
some very good reasons why certain subsets of gay men would have
internal micro flora that are abnormal. To get right down to
brass tacks, I think HIV is a marker for immune dysfunction as
opposed to being a cause. I think immune dysfunction actually
proceeds HIV positivity and makes it possible.
Holding these views puts Tony in a very small minority.
What is it like psychologically for you and for people who think like
you to be on the outside? It's isolating. One of the labels tossed
at me and others like me is a denialist, and that's actually kind
of hurtful to tell you the truth. You wouldn't see yourself as a
denialist? No, not at all. I don't even know that they say I'm in
denial of. I mean, I've lost many scores of friends to AIDS so I'm
certainly not in denial of the actual illness. I just view the
I found that discussion with Tony really interesting. I mean I'm
completely mainstream about HIV AIDS. AIDS is caused by the HIV
retrovirus no question about that. He doubts that, he's sceptical
about whether it's causal, you could say that he denies that it's
causal. But he's at the end of the spectrum where you can have a
conversation with him. As a scientist, I find Tony's views hard
However I think there may be a link between how he approaches the
evidence for the causes of AIDS and how some climate sceptics may look
at the causes of global warming. Problems arise when you're studying
complex data and trying to Understanding what causes what in
complex systems in like biology, that I study, or climate science is
really difficult. Let me illustrate this here. Imagine that each of
these poles are different events. Events A, B and C and we have time
running up here on the floor. Event A causes event B. Event A also
causes event C. But if you're a scientist you don't know anything
about event A and you're simply studying B and C, what you'll see
is after a certain period of time you will see B and then always or
nearly always you will see C a certain amount of time afterwards.
It would be a natural consequence to think that B will cause C when
it's absolutely not the case. I'll think of a concrete example, for
example smoking and lung cancer. Let's imagine event A is smoking,
and event B is yellow teeth, that occurs after a certain amount of
time. And let's imagine event C is lung cancer. You could perhaps
imagine as a scientist that you observe yellow teeth and then you
observe lung cancer and then maybe yellow teeth causes lung cancer.
That's obviously nonsense but if you didn't know about smoking you
could be led into that erroneous conclusion. That's the problem with
complexity, that's the problem with There's an overwhelming body of
evidence that says we are warming our planet, but complexity allows
for confusion and for alternative theories to develop. The only
solution is too look at all the evidence as a whole. I think some
extreme sceptics decide what to think first, and then cherry pick
the data to support their case. We scientists have to acknowledge we
now operate in a world where point of view not peer review holds sway.
I think part of the problem may be past controversies, where
mainstream science has failed to There is one such subject where the
research has to be carried out under strict security because
Isolated in a remote corner of the country, a highly contentious
scientific trial is being conducted. We're not protecting the public
from them. We're protecting them from the anti-GM activists who have
been very keen to disrupt GM trials. This field is home to a large
experiment in Genetically Modified food. Professor Jonathan Jones is
working to create a new kind of potato that would be resistant to a
mould called late blight. Alongside standard potatoes, he also planted
two GM varieties, and waited to see what would happen. This is perfect
blight weather actually. If you're a late blight pathogen you would be
very very happy today. Potato blight is a disease that caused the
Irish potato famine. It causes ?3.5 billion a year of losses in
potatoes and tomatoes. It's a fungus-like organism but it makes
spores that can blow around. We didn't inoculate this. It blew in
from somebody else's field probably 20 to 30 miles away. It can rip
through a crop in a week. The trial is at an early stage, but the GM
varieties seem to be standing up to the blight much better than the
standard ones. Farmers actually spend about ?500 a hectare
controlling this disease so if you have 100 hectares of potatoes
that's ?50,000 out the door for spraying 15 times a year to control
the disease. Clearly it would be better if we didn't have to do all
that spraying. What we're trying to do here is get genes into the
potatoes that would mitigate the need for all that spraying.
it's this manipulation of genes that's the source of contention.
Critics have objected on several grounds, from safety issues to
environmental concerns. It's time for us to say no, we don't want it,
we don't want their new technology, it doesn't benefit us, it doesn't
benefit the environment, in fact it threatens us and the environment.
The GM debate once again raises the question of public trust in science.
There's a gap between the fears of some sections of the public, and
the opinion of scientists that what they are doing is both useful and
safe. I think my primary emotion is bemusement. Where are they coming
from? What is going on in their heads that they feel so strongly
that this must be campaigned They often assert this is a failed
If it's failed why do 14 million farmers plant 134 million hectares
of it? They do so because it works, farmers are not stupid. There seems
to be a mutual misunderstanding from both the scientists and the
public. The controversy surrounding GM was something I really wanted to
understand. I went and talked to members of the public to find out
why they were so against it. One thing that came up very often was
that they were against eating food with genes in it. That's something
that would never occur to a scientist because a scientist
obviously knows all food has genes in it. But why should a member of
the public know that? What had happened here, is that we
scientists hadn't gone out there and asked what bothered the public,
we hadn't had dialogue with them. Scientists had forgotten that we
don't operate in an isolated bubble. We cannot take the public for
granted. We have to talk to them, we have to communicate the issues.
We have to earn their trust if science really is going to benefit
Over the next few years, every country on the globe faces tough
decisions over what to do about climate change. I've been thinking
how scientists can win back the confidence we're going to need if
we're going to make those choices wisely. Quite a grand door. To a
rather workman-like area, we're going down to the basement. Oh wow!
Before I started my Presidency of the Royal Society, Keith Moore, the
head Librarian, wanted to take me on a tour of the archives to give
me a glimpse of some of the jewels they contain. Here we hold some of
the genuinely rare materials from the book stock. Being surrounded by
the products of so many brilliant minds is quite a humbling
experience. These are the minutes of the meetings. All the notes!
this goes right back to the first meeting of the RS Really? What year
is this? 1660. So here we have the memorandum on 28 November 1660.
First meeting of the organisation. Look at that. Not even called the
Royal Society. Is that Wren? That's Christopher Wren. Robert Boyle,
they're all here! You know this has made me feel a bit star struck here
I have to say. I'm here in the royal society, 350 years of an
endeavour which is build on a respect for observation, respect
for data, respect for experiment trust no one trust only what the
experiment and data tell you, we have to continue to use that
approach if we are to solve It's become clear to me that if we
hold to these ideals of trust in evidence then we have a
responsibility to publically argue our case. Because in this
conflicted and volatile debate scientists are not the only voices
When a scientific issue has important outcomes for society,
then the politics becomes increasingly more important. So if
we look at this issue of climate change that is particularly
significant because that has affects on how we manage our
economy and manage our politics. And so this has become a crucially
political matter and we can see that by the way the forces are
being lined up on both sides. What really is required here is a focus
on the science keeping the politics and keeping the ideologies out of
the way. One thing you can't get away without seeing is Sir Isaac
Newton. Is this Principia? This is his great work of the laws of
motion. This is the book that laid foundation for gravity. That's
right. This was a standard text for scientists for about 200 years, it
was really not until Einstein came along that it people began to
seriously revalue the way the universe worked. I need to touch
it! Yes, do. Maybe just finally here. This is the great book of
course, the origin of species. was presented to the society.
at it. From the awful. Rather overwhelmed by the librarian.
nasty 1980s biro! Earning trust requires more than
just focusing on the science, we have to communicate it effectively
too. Scientists have got to get out there. They have to be open about
everything that they do. They do have to talk to the media even if
it does sometimes put their reputation at doubt because if we