In my latest Spectator column, I take aim at Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford professor, who has resigned from the Royal Society because it has refused to expel Elon Musk, whom she regards as beyond the pale because of his views on climate change, among other things. I point out that if challenging the prevailing scientific orthodoxy in a particular field is a reason to expel someone from the Royal Society, that would mean having to retrospectively cancel Sir Isaac Newton, who was the Society’s President from 1703 to 1727. Here’s how it begins:
In a notorious interview in the Sunday Times in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist James Watson said, among other things, that aborting babies with gay genes was “common sense” and that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their [blacks] intelligence is the same as ours [whites] – whereas all the testing says not really”. He also defended the explanation offered by Larry Summers of why there are fewer female professors in Stem subjects than male – there are more men at the right-hand tail of the IQ distribution curve. It caused such a furore that Watson was forced to cancel a forthcoming book tour, Nature ran an editorial saying his remarks were “beyond the pale” and the trustees of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended him from administrative duties, forcing him to retire shortly afterwards. Yet at no point did anyone suggest he should be expelled from the Royal Society.
Contrast Watson’s treatment with that of Elon Musk. In August, 74 fellows wrote to the institution asking whether the owner of X was a “fit and proper person” to be a member of the society – a distinction he’s enjoyed since being elected in 2018 – for his technological achievements in space travel and electric cars. The president consulted m’learned friends and was told that Musk wasn’t in breach of the society’s code of conduct – an important consideration, since if he’s excluded because of his political views he might be able to sue for discrimination under the Equality Act. When this advice was communicated to the fellowship, there was a good deal of grumbling, intensified when Donald Trump won the US presidential election and announced he would appoint Musk as co-director of the Department of Government Efficiency.
The discontent came to a head last week when Dorothy Bishop, an Oxford professor and one of the signatories of the original letter, wrote a blog post announcing her resignation from the society. After cataloguing Musk’s sins – “promoting vaccine hesitation”, “downplaying the climate emergency” and “spreading deep fakes and misinformation” – she said she could no longer comply with the code of conduct, which required her to ‘treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy’, and that she did not wish to be associated with “someone who appears to be modelling himself on a Bond villain”.
Bishop’s resignation has prompted the president to look again at whether Musk can be got rid of. But in the society’s 364-year history, only two fellows have been expelled, one in 1709 for not paying his dues, and one in 1775 for embezzlement. If Musk was kicked out for his controversial views, why not Watson, who is still alive? Indeed, if failing to treat fellow members “collegially and with courtesy” is a breach of the rules, shouldn’t the other 73 signatories of the letter be given their marching orders? In 2020, Francis Collins, a fellow of the society and then head of the National Institutes of Health, called for a swift “takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration. The three original signatories included Sunetra Gupta, the recipient of the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award. Not exactly collegial behaviour. Wouldn’t he have to go, too?
Worth reading in full.
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In a happier, simpler time, this would have been a rather boring academic discussion about temperature measurements.
Today it’s part of a battle to keep the state out of our lives and be able to live free.
Pretty nuts really.
This academic discussion is being controlled and as far as I can see, discussed less (ie detail) and sensationalised more! Very nuts!
Some time in the late 1980s or very early 1990, I was on a summer holiday on a farm on Bodmin Moor. By that time, it hadn’t rained in this area for 19 weeks in a row and some of the moor farms received water supplies from tankers. That was a generally hot summer, not the five weeks of no rain with mostly lovely temperatures we had this year.
Ha, my lasting memory of Bodmin is failing my first driving test there ( steep inclines + crap clutch control = going backwards when attempting a hill start. Not great when there’s a car behind you.
) but passing second time. I miss Cornwall though.
Real experts manage to do that after passing the test. I’ve recently encountered one (and waited patiently on the pavement until he had remembered which of all these pedals are supposed to be used in what order).
My brother’s instructor used to put my brother’s cigarettes, and later his wristwatch behind the back wheel. Made for really good hill starts!
The Met Office used the “break in the clouds” explanation to explain the Heathrow “record”, ignoring criticism that by amazing co-incidence three jets landed on an unusual approach (West to East) and promptly turned on to a taxiway and blew jet exhausts over the exact spot that the temperature sensor was positioned. These Mexplanations are getting tedious. In other news, some US “records” are held by sensors positioned a few feet from a municipal incinerator, or top of a black roof or in a car-park. They served their purpose, but that purpose was not as a measure of climate, and were then re-purposed to create bogus records to fill newspaper headlines and create climate scares.
More detail on the Heathrow 2015 “record”, including site map and aircraft movements: https://clivebest.com/blog/?p=6721
Don’t know if it’s of any use but by looking at Flightradar24 playback for that day, two RAF Typhoons were operating from that base around that time: Flights CHAOS011 (reg ZJ914) and CHAOS012 (reg ZK377). After a brief exercise over the North Sea, CHAOS011 landed just after 15:10. CHAOS012 landed 15 minutes later.
Of course, it must be sheer coincidence!
A weather event is not Climate.
A normal summer is not Climate Hell.
Putting an electronic measuring device at Heathrow on tarmac, near jet engines, behind a magnifying glass, next to a fire is not science. It is fraud. Move it 5 miles to the countryside and the temp was 36C.
The entire cult of warm and cult of the changing thingy is a fraud.
I had first-hand experience of such temperature anomalies during my working life. I knew this was bs as soon as it was published.
“The Met Office distorts data and lies” is not the surprise. That would be them telling the truth
My kitchen is usually a fairly cool room since it’s north facing. But strangely enough, after I’ve cooked a roast and I leave the oven door open, the kitchen quickly warms up a bit for a while and then fairly quickly the temperature drops again.
Must be climate change – so I’d better stop cooking roasts and start eating raw insects.
All these institutions that have been hollowed out by GangGreen termites must eventually realise that trust, once destroyed, take years of effort to reestablish. Witness also the Zro Covid, Lockdown and “Vaccine” enthusiasts.
So far as the “Climate” scam is concerned, it should be remembered that accurate records for a significant number of years is the exception rather than the rule, so suggesting that some weather event is “Unprecedented” is meaningless at best.
And that is without considering the multitude of proven cases where activist “Scientists” have had their smelly little thumbs on the ‘data’.
So we have Australia’ BOM admitting that under their regime, the temperatures of the past have been ‘discovered’ to be around 1°C colder than originally recorded.
Coming back to 2022 (and before), all the recent ‘unprecedented’ temperatures such as Coningsby are blatantly and deliberately fraudulent. If we had even a few honest politicians, all these MET chancers would have been sacked, long ago.
“Global Temperature” ??? “Warmest year” ???. etc etc . But what does any of that stuff really mean? Is there really such a thing as a “global temperature? If so, how is it calculated?—– But since most of the time we recorded temperatures using thermometers at individual places around the world at different times and mostly only in wealthy western countries (USA, Europe etc), how can we know what temperatures were where we did not have extensive coverage, which was really the case most of the time and over most of the globe? —-The answer is we cannot. Then we started to get temperature data from satellites around 1979, but how can you compare thermometer readings where coverage was sparse from let’s say 1925 or 1845 to satellite data that covers almost the whole planet? —You cannot.. —–So this idea that we have a “warmest year on record” or “warmest since records began” etc is misleading, especially when it is used to promote solutions to some problem that might not even exist, or that might exist but is not much of a problem. On TV I regularly see politicians and bureaucrats, eco activists and assorted “save the planet” people latch onto elements of the unreliable temperature record, like the one this summer where a temperature of 40C was apparently recorded. This ofcourse is what is known as “cherry picking” or “confirmation bias”, where someone only looks for things that support their preconceived idea and ignore everything that doesn’t.— The temperature record of earth is a jumble of data ,adjusted here and there for various anomalies, such as the build up of towns and cities around a site where temperatures may have been recorded for the last 100 years or more, and it is known that towns and cities are warmer, sometimes by several degrees. Out of all of this clutter of guesses, assumptions, missing data and different forms of data collection we are led to believe that some “scientists” know what year was warmer than some other year, often to accuracies of hundredths of a degree, when the thermometers used were never designed for such accuracies. It is also important to bear in mind that if something warms, it does not necessarily mean humans warmed it. To claim humans have warmed something requires evidence, and since there is nothing unusual about current temperatures that would simply be an assumption, and when the assumption is motivated by the desire for certain public policy’s then what we have is a “cautionary tale”.
So either the Met Office lie by sticking to their story, or lie by giving an unbelievable excuse why they didn’t quality check it thoroughly enough?
In 2015 I happened to be in North East New Zealand, when Cyclone Pam caused extreme damage and around 11 deaths in Vanuatu and some damage to other Pacific island states. The MET (using their extreme GangGreen technology) forecasted major problems next for NE New Zealand but, fortunately this turned out to be a nothingburger.
Although we are assured that The Science is absolutely Settled, it is, in reality, anything but. At that time, Richard Betts, now Head of Climate Impacts at the MET Hadley Centre, was presumably charged by his gaffer, Dame Julia Sligo, to occasionally go onto Climate Blogs and fly the GangGreen flag.
On the then excellent Bishop Hill Blog, I pointed out the inadequacies of their forecasts for Pam, the fact that the claimed wind speed was obviously inflated and that severe tropical cyclones were entirely ‘precedented’.
Betts replied pointing out that the attribution of extreme weather arising from burning “fossil” fuels was well established, quoting the UN’s IPCC Report. To which I pointed out that the IPCC’s latest report said nothing of the kind (as contaminated as it is by GangGreen assumptions) and that his quotation was lifted directly from the “Summary for Policymakers”, which is a 100% political document.
We then heard nothing more from Betts, who is obviously not any kind of scientist, just another GangGreen charlatan.