Last week I was stitched up like a kipper by the BBC. Perhaps you saw the programme — a Horizon documentary called Science Under Attack. Perhaps you were even among the dozens whom it inspired to send me hate emails along the lines of, ‘Ha ha. Think you know more about science than a Nobel prizewinner do you? Idiot!’ Perhaps it’s time I set the record straight.
Last week I was stitched up like a kipper by the BBC. Perhaps you saw the programme — a Horizon documentary called Science Under Attack. Perhaps you were even among the dozens whom it inspired to send me hate emails along the lines of, ‘Ha ha. Think you know more about science than a Nobel prizewinner do you? Idiot!’ Perhaps it’s time I set the record straight.
It started in August last year when I had an email from a BBC producer/director called Emma Jay. She was making a film on ‘public trust in science’ to be presented by the next President of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse. ‘The tone of the film is very questioning but with no preconceptions,’ she wrote. ‘Sir Paul is very aware of the culpability of scientists and that will come across in the film. They will not be portrayed as white-coated magicians who should be left to work in their ivory towers — their failings will be dealt with in detail.’ As an ‘influential blogger on climate change’, would I chat to Nurse about my views? Though I had my suspicions, I agreed after Emma had reassured me that Nurse was genuinely open-minded on the subject and had no axe to grind.
In fact I was rather looking forward to the meeting. It’s not often you get an actual Nobel laureate (Physiology or Medicine, 2001) popping round to your home. Besides, I was keen to find out what he planned to do about the Royal Society’s increasingly embarrassing position on anthropogenic global warming.
Both his predecessors — Lord May and Lord Rees — were fanatical warmists and shifted the Royal Society’s politics accordingly. Last year, 43 of the Royal Society’s members wrote in protest at its advocacy of what remains an unproven hypothesis. By allying itself so closely to the politicised ‘consensus’, the Royal Society seemed to be betraying its traditions of honest scepticism (‘Nullius in verba’) and also running the risk of one day being proved humiliatingly wrong.
What I didn’t properly consider — though of course I should, having done the odd bit of TV myself — is how documentaries like this really work. When your presenter announces, as he so often does, that he is ‘going on a journey of discovery’, he is in fact doing no such thing. Right from the start, often before the presenter has even been chosen, the director and producer know exactly where the film is going and what it is going to say. The interviewees are mere pawns: the camera is to be pointed at them until such time as they can be prodded into saying what the documentary requires.
And so it was with me. I should have guessed something was wrong when, from the off, Nurse’s questioning proved unexpectedly aggressive for a man who was open-minded. ‘Perhaps,’ I persuaded myself, ‘this is just his natural manner.’ Which was suicidally naive, I now realise, because had I twigged in time I could have fought my corner instead of being constrained by politeness.
When, for example, Nurse expressed surprise that I didn’t read ‘peer-reviewed papers’, I wouldn’t have responded mildly that my job as a blogger was to be an ‘interpreter of interpretations’. I would have said what I really thought, which is: ‘What a bloody silly question. I’m a journalist, not a scientist. Even if I did read peer-reviewed papers, what would my opinion matter? I report on what other experts say; I’ve never claimed to be an expert myself. And while we’re on the subject, Paul Nurse, how many peer-reviewed science papers have you read and understood on climate change — given that this field embraces everything from palaeoclimatology to meteorology, physics, geology and chemistry, and given that your particular specialism is cancer treatment?’
But it’s precisely to avoid this kind of unhelpful response that the producer/director lies to you when she makes her approach. Of course she’s not going to alert you beforehand to the fact that this presenter has only come round to make you look like a fool. (Not that that’s going to be difficult when he’s sat there grilling you for three hours. For two hours 55 minutes you can be as lucid and brilliant as you like. It’s the five minutes when you’re not that they’re after.)
If I seem to protest too much, look at the programme. It is riddled with basic errors (including the mindboggling claim that humans produce seven times more CO2 than comes from natural sources). And it makes no effort to question the warmist scientists. On a trip to Nasa, Nurse is shown being hugely impressed as a global warming ‘expert’ shows him how spiffy and expensive his satellite equipment is and just how science-y his data; on a trip to the University of East Anglia, Nurse nods sympathetically as a rueful-looking Phil Jones explains that he is a man whose innocent actions have been cruelly misinterpreted by ignorant journalists and bloggers.
And guess who is called upon at this point to represent those ignorant bloggers? Yep. Using a crude but effective mixture of appeal to authority (‘Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Laureate, President of the Royal Society, speaks from on high…’), judicious editing, and a cynical, dishonest narrative in which climate-change sceptics are bracketed with violent anti-GM protestors and people who think Aids isn’t caused by HIV, this programme sought not to understand the science behind global warming but merely to smear those who dissent from the true faith.
Last week, the Daily Mail summarised an extract from former BBC newsreader Peter Sissons’s biography with the headline: ‘The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots… and I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent.’ Peter, I know just how you feel.
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