The perversion of science by the Royal Society and its Canadian counterpart
When Lord Robert May — a distinguished British population biologist — told a journalist: “I am the president of the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is over,” he was risking the reputation of the venerable institution he headed.
Presidents of national science academies are not meant to engage in ex cathedra statements, but to promote objective research.
However, according to a devastating report this week from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Royal Society — former home to Newton and Darwin — has adopted a stance of intolerant infallibility over climate science and, even less appropriately, over policy.
The report, Nullius in Verba: The Royal Society and Climate Change, by Andrew Montford, is important to Canada not merely because of the continued threat of climate alarmism, but because the Royal Society of Canada has twice attached its name to intensely political statements from its British counterpart.
The phrase “Nullius in verba,” the Royal Society’s motto, means “on the word of no one” and implies that science should always be determined by objectivity rather than the say-so of any “authority.” For ordinary folk like us, however, (including lazy and/or crusading journalists, and even scientists in other specialities) authority is all we usually have to go on, which explains the catastrophists’ relentless emphasis on the “consensus” of those 2,000-plus weighty “experts” who craft the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.