"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 ã3.5 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 ã500 a hectare controlling this disease so if you have 100 hectares of potatoes that's ã50,000 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"