Horizon trips up James Delingpole but gives Fred Singer a free ride
James Delingpole on Horizon – “It’s not my job to sit down and read peer reviewed papers”
Last night Horizon dealt with the climate sceptics. By and large, the programme was encouragingly in-depth and thoughtful. It appears to have been a project of Sir Paul Nurse, incoming head of the Royal Society, and this bodes well for the RS – Nurse is personable, clear and engaging, and obviously has an appetite to go out and quietly and politely fight his corner.
Pre-show controversy had centred on UK sceptic blogger James Delingpole, who allegedly complained he was ‘intellectual raped’ by Nurse and the BBC. But while Nurse’s own views on climate sceptics came over pretty clearly in the programme, Delingpole doesn’t appear to have been set up. He manages to make himself look bad without any help from Horizon.
The thing that tripped him up was a fairly straightforward and relaxed line of questioning from Nurse about whether Delingpole – who had just been decrying the use of consensus in science – would submit to a consensus scientific opinion if he needed treating for cancer.
Delingpole’s failure to address the question – “Um, shall we talk about, shall we talk about climategate?” was not just a terrible interview answer, it was also pretty mystifying. You’d think a sceptic commentator who spends so much time producing vitriolic rants against the scientific consensus would have considered this line of argument, but apparently not. He also didn’t do himself any favours with “It is not my job to sit down and read peer-reviewed [scientific] papers, because I simply haven’t got the timeâ?¦” This is pretty damning self-indictment for someone who claims to be a commentator on climate science.
Delingpole claims the programme makers recorded three hours of footage and picked the bits that show him in a bad light, but I’m not sure whether this should surprise a journalist. Certainly, there was no indication of unfair editing to make him look stupid.
It’s hardly news that Delingpole doesn’t really know what he’s talking about – he’s a controversialist blogger who is paid to drive traffic to the Telegraph website. At the time of writing, his blog post about Horizon had 2,500 comments, suggesting that his job isn’t in danger anytime soon.
Horizon’s treatment of prominent climate sceptic Dr Fred Singer is more interesting. Nurse introduced Singer only as an ‘atmospheric physicist who has been studying climate science for nearly 50 years’ and an ‘influence’ to climate sceptics’.
IT wasn’t mentioned that as well as being a physicist, Singer has worked as a paid lobbyist for polluting industry on a wide range of issues, as documented extensively by Naomi Oreskes in her book ‘Merchants of Doubt’. He has worked for at least 11 ExxonMobil funded think tanks, and has a long track record of promoting anti-consensus polluter-friendly lines on issues including Ozone pollution, DDT, acid rain, and now climate change.
In the program, Singer talked about climate change being caused by solar rays. Instead of challenging him, the program cut to Nurse making some rather disconnected remarks about ‘cherry-picking’, and then another talking head from NASA saying that Singer was wrong. This is an issue, because sceptic lobbyists like Singer aren’t trying to win the argument, they’re just trying to make it look like there is an argument. Horizon pulled its punches and left the viewer feeling like ‘one expert says this but another says this’.
In part, this reflects a wider issue with the program. Particularly in the examination of the climate issue, there was no analysis of why the consensus scientific position has come under such assault. A society-wide response to climate change poses a significant risk to vested interests like oil and gas companies – who have consequently expended a lot of time, effort and money to confuse the issue.
It’s clearly not the case that all climate sceptics are in the pay of the oil industry. But the fact that Nurse was able to make Delingpole’s arguments look ridiculous by imagining them transferred to the field of cancer treatment does demonstrate a simple truth: there is no powerful lobby funding scientists like Singer to muddy the waters on whether cancer treatments are effective or not, and ignoring Singer’s motivations is really missing the point.
Nurse’s concluding statement was: “scientists have got to get out there, they’ve got to be open about everything that they do â?¦ if we do not do that it will be filled by others who don’t understand the science, and who may be driven by politics and ideology.”
This is obviously right. But it doesn’t tell the whole story. The imbalance of power and resource between those who stick up for the science and those who seek to muddy the waters is probably also worth thinking about.