The Royal Society (RS) is the world’s oldest scientific academy, which, despite its name, began the decoupling of truth from power. Its motto, Nullius in Verba, translated as “on the word of no one”, puts truth claims out of the hands of the mighty and into the hands of anyone capable of reason and empirical observation. Objectivity, not princes, should rule, and claims to truth must be testable. But the Royal Society’s recent honours to some of the world’s most controversial scientific figures reveals the decline of institutional science into ideological blobbery.
Last week, climate scientist Michael Mann and immunologist Anthony Fauci were made Foreign Members – fellows – of the prestigious academy, in U.K. science’s answer to the Oscars. “From visualising the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution to leading the response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Royal Society President Adrian Smith, “their diverse range of expertise is furthering human understanding and helping to address some of our greatest challenges.”
Despite his award, Fauci, long-time adviser to U.S. Presidents and recently-departed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes for Health (NIH), has recently been implicated in an explosive controversy. According to allegations, NIAID supported the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funded ‘gain-of-function’ research at the Wuhan laboratory identified by the increasingly plausible lab-leak theory about the virus’s origins. Worse for Fauci, within days of the award, it emerged that his former senior adviser, David Morens, had been deleting emails to avoid Freedom of Information probes into the agency’s role in the pandemic. NIH has since disbarred EcoHealth Alliance from receiving federal funding amid calls for criminal investigations.
None of which is to find Fauci guilty on these here pages of the Daily Sceptic. But it nonetheless raises questions about why the Royal Society would seek to involve itself, at this stage of an emerging and potentially devastating scientific scandal. Fauci, like the U.K.’s most senior lockdown joy-busters, Valance and Witty, became a ‘household figure’ for Americans, but according to a parallel narrative, his incautious scheming may have helped to unleash the pandemic in the first place. The RS cannot have been unaware of the affair. Could it not wait a year to see how the chips fell before handing out the gong?
Not for want of trying, Michael Mann is less of a household name, better known only to aficionados of the interminable climate wars. Mann is infamous for having produced the so-called ‘hockey stick’ chart that seemingly provided the ‘unequivocal evidence’ of mankind’s responsibility for rising global temperatures. But others, who wanted to understand how Mann et al. had used data from ‘proxies’ such as tree-rings and ice-cores to reconstruct historical global temperature data, found themselves, not unlike Fauci’s detractors, stonewalled. FoI requests were refused.
A cache of emails between several climate researchers was subsequently leaked, seeming to show those scientists behaving badly: deleting emails, slandering colleagues, conspiring to prevent career advancement by their foes and the publication of hostile research – even, on some accounts, how to conceal shortcomings in their data. The affair became known as ‘Climategate’, and made Mann a minor celebrity.
But all this is ancient history. Mann’s first charts were published in the late 1990s. And Climategate occurred in 2009. Fifteen years later, Mann is back under the spotlight only because he recently sued journalist Mark Steyn and rocket scientist Rand Simberg for comments they had made in articles published in 2012.
In any normal jurisdiction, 12 years would be well outside any statutory limitation for defamation. But on any normal planet, scientific disputes would surely be settled by, you know, science. But a hallmark of far-reaching policies that seemingly protect us and the planet from pathogens and slightly different weather is that to question them is verboten. Because only bad actors would want to challenge the indubitable rectitude of institutional science’s panjandrums.
But what happened to nullius in verba?
More than simply policies, the politics of saving the planet requires something of an overhaul of outmoded concepts that emerged during the Age of Reason. Empiricism and rationalism are all well and good, but look, you know the virus isn’t going to submit to FOI requests, either. And the greenhouse effect isn’t going to wait around for a vote, much less a debate before it melts the ice caps. So just trust in the divine right of Scientists, or everybody dies, okay?
The Royal Society briefly took on the green movement in the late 1990s on the issue of genetic modification, but lost to the power of ‘Frankenfood’ headlines and the fact that the society’s PR skill wasn’t equal to its political ambitions. As ‘The Science’ says, ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’, and the RS’s next President, the late Robert May, was a mathematician-turned-population biologist whose fire-and-brimstone environmentalism helped to set the tone of debates about climate change over the next quarter of a century. Rather than bringing cool, calm, scientific objectivity to questions about rising global temperatures, May characteristically shouted down scientific and political critics in angry, conspiracy theory-laden rants.
“I am the President of the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is over,” the firebrand told the BBC’s Roger Harrabin, the journalist revealed in 2010. Nullius in verba no longer means ‘on the word of no one’, explained May in 2007. It means “respect the facts”. He didn’t say what “respect the facts” actually means, however, and took many liberties with them himself. At the end of May’s tenure, the RS published a ‘A guide to the facts and fictions about climate change‘ to counter “those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming”. The guide claimed:
There are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the U.S. oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC. They appear motivated in their arguments by opposition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which seek urgent action to tackle climate change through a reduction in greenhouse gas emission. Often all these individuals and organisations have in common is their opposition to the growing consensus of the scientific community that urgent action is required through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But the opponents are well-organised and well-funded.
No evidence of this conspiracy theory has been produced, and the Royal Society remained tight-lipped about it, refusing to enter into debates or to provide any basis for its claims. Because, er, Science?
The gongs the RS awards to scientists, very much in the mode of May, then, may well be better explained by their politics than their scientific discoveries. There is more than a mere closing of the ranks in these awards to controversial and questionable characters – and perhaps an attempt to mobilise reinforcements in a battle that has been raging for the duration of this century. What is institutional science for? Mann and Fauci are surely defenders of the faith and the realm of institutional science. But where is the discovery?
It would of course be something else had the Royal Society made these awards to individuals noted for work that contradicted political orthodoxy, or had recently overturned established scientific knowledge. But Fauci and Mann are precisely the opposite. Arguably, the controversies surrounding both men risk undermining institutional science. So, of course, the proper thing to do is to double down, using the institution’s remaining prestige to protect them.
The same award was made by the Royal Society to one of the deep green movement’s most controversial characters, Paul Ehrlich. In 1968, Ehrlich and his wife’s book, The Population Bomb, predicted global resource depletion and famines – and other secular recastings of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – for the sins of industrialisation. “We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,” he told the New York Times in 1969. Ehrlich also predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.
Forty-four years later, in 2012, when Ehrlich was made a fellow of the RS, we were all still here. And we are still here, now, 56 years on. Where is the science, if such claims stand no test in reality, and institutional science rewards such failure with gongs?
“Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?” asked Ehrlich in the RS’s journal the year after his award. But the more pertinent question is, for how much longer is institutional science going to be dominated by doom-mongers with more than half a century of failed prognostications behind them without suffering a catastrophic collapse of credibility? Like any bureaucracy, the RS and its membership sense the opportunity created by generating a sense of crisis that they, and only they, are the solution to.
The RS’s awards are unmistakably political. They inflate the ranks of institutional science, which has taken a categorically political position, epitomised by the RS. These self-inflating panjandrums are angered and confused by criticism and disobedience. But ultimately, all that the conflicted scientists and decrepit institutions they populate had to do to avoid the controversies that now threaten to undermine their authority is to listen to their critics as peers, and to accept their position within democratic politics as mere advisers, rather than as an entitled clerisy. They had other plans, of course. And science was their first victim.
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