Source: ABC
URL: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/inconversation/nigel-calder/3244676#transcript
Date: 16/08/2007
Event: Nigel Calder: "scientists are not the perfect reasoning individuals they might like to think they are"
Attribution: ABC
People:
Robyn Williams: Good evening. Robyn Williams with In Conversation, and tonight, something in some ways rather surprising. My guest is one of the most experienced and recognised science journalists of his generation, Nigel Calder, but someone who's been willing to step away from orthodox opinion whatever the possible costs to his reputation: brave man indeed.
If you saw the cover story of Newsweek a few days ago, you'll know what I mean. It announced, over a brilliant red picture of the Sun: 'Global Warming is a hoax' - but then added - 'or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change'. Well Nigel Calder is one of those, but I'm not sure he's at all well funded. We'll come to that.
But I have a particularly soft spot for the Calder name because Nigel's father, Ritchie Calder, was in Science Show No. 1 in August 1975, 32 years ago, almost precisely. Nigel Calder's on line from his home in Sussex. Nigel, was Ritchie a scientist as well?
Nigel Calder: No, my dad, Richard Calder, left school at 16, started life as a crime reporter, never went to university although he finished up as a professor at Edinburgh University, and he learned his science from the scientists. Perhaps I should say the one thing I was sure I should never do is be a science writer because how could I compete with him but in fact it worked out.
Robyn Williams: What did he become professor of?
Nigel Calder: He was a professor of international relations.
Robyn Williams: When I met him he was a Lord.
Nigel Calder: All that stuff.
Robyn Williams: He was a politician in a way.
Nigel Calder: No, he wasn't really, he actually rejected the idea of becoming a parliamentary candidate when that was suggested to him. He did speak in the House of Lords and he voted on the Labour side but he wasn't a party politician in the usual sense. No he became Professor of International Relations (at Edinburgh University) because his explorations of current science in the post war period brought him into all the activities of world development and what was being done about the deserts, and the jungles, and the Arctic and he was travelling around on behalf of United Nations Agencies and so he became very well informed about those problems. But this was after he'd done his groundwork in the 1930s with the likes of Rutherford and the splitting of the atom and all that sort of stuff.
Robyn Williams: So you said you were going to avoid writing about science. So what changed your mind?
Nigel Calder: Oh, I didn't particularly want to avoid science, I was trained as a physicist but my idea was to become a film director but for various reasons I won't bore you with my plans in that direction fell through, and so when New Scientist was being talked about as a new magazine of science in 1956, I'd been working just as a physicist at the Phillips Lab in England and I took the chance to join the editorial staff. I'd already written a book as it happened in my spare time, I was able to thump that on the would-be editor's, Percy Cudlipp, desk to cover it and he gave me a job.
Robyn Williams: I remember when New Scientist first came out I was in a physics class in secondary school in south London and this grey magazine appeared and it bore no relationship of course to the glossy, glamorous, colourful object that racily hits our desks these days, but we were nonetheless struck. Had you any idea it was going to become the international success that it has been since?
Nigel Calder: Oh it was an international success long ago, Robyn. I can remember being asked by the White House to bring out an American edition that was back in the 1960s. I mean it is now much more organised as an international magazine but it was a success from the outset.
Robyn Williams: How did you feel when you became editor about the problem that we all have as science journalists as to whether we seem to be cheerleaders for science or critical of the scientific establishment?
Nigel Calder: I always saw it as a two-way street. I can remember writing a leader called Science in Disrepute which was about a whole string of things that people were doing that were stupid and that got a lot of attention. No, as I see it the job is to tell the story straight and especially to explore, to look behind the curtains and prod around in the bottom drawers and see what's really going on that isn't being reported. And that I found very demanding when I was having to produce the equivalent of a small book every week with a small, although very energetic staff, there just wasn't the time to go deeply enough into some things to find out what was really going on. You know that was one of the reasons why after 4 years, and I was only 34 when I finished as editor, rather than staying on the treadmill for the next 40 years, break loose and find the time and the means to go deeply into what was going on in science.
Robyn Williams: Yes, the last word on the New Scientist. I remember in the 70s one of your successors put Uri Geller, the spoon bender on the front cover asking whether he was kind of legit and whether he had the secret of the universe. And of course there was an uproar from the scientific establishment thinking that was quite outrageous. But stretching the boundaries is all very good fun, but it seems to be implied that you are forsaking the orthodoxy if you do that.
Nigel Calder: Well look, there's a big difference, Robyn, between courting the likes of Uri Geller and going out and finding people who are proving that the continents move, who are just a small minority, which is the way of big discoveries in science.
Robyn Williams: Well Wegener, way back then was laughed at when he was saying that continental drift was likely.
Nigel Calder: Oh yes, yes, there's a long history of these things. But let's be clear, there are people saying all kinds of different things in science, some of which are right and some of which are wrong and you have to tread carefully, you don't want to tell people things that are stupid. On the other hand you do have to get around the sort of wall that exists where the people who rule the subjects at any particular time would like to prevent the young upstarts from coming forward with their stories. And that's one of the reasons why you need time. You know if I wanted to mug up the subject it would mean travelling around the world talking to 100 scientists, especially to the young Turks and they had their own samizdat, so you got to know who the other guys were in other places who were singing the same song.
Robyn Williams: Like that secret newsletter that they used to have in the Soviet Union telling what was actually happening.
Nigel Calder: That's right, yes.
Robyn Williams: Well there's a marvellous section in your book The Magic Universe, in fact it's on page 197 actually: Discovery - why the top experts are usually wrong. And the first example you give is a delicious one because, familiar to this program, Derek Freeman from the Australian National University challenged Margaret Mead who was talking about growing up in Samoa and it took, I think, 40 years for the legend that she seemed to be perpetrating to be knocked down by Derek Freeman. In fact, I don't know whether you know this, but David Williamson wrote a play about Derek Freeman giving some of the story of his struggle. But why did you choose that as the first example in the section?
Nigel Calder: Because in some ways it was the most striking and because I suspected that many of my readers might actually believe that what Margaret Mead said about the sexual behaviour of Samoan teenagers was correct, even though Derek Freeman had demolished it. And also the fact that you mentioned, that it took 40 years to straighten that bit of science out.
Robyn Williams: Would it take quite so long these days?
Nigel Calder: Oh, absolutely. I mean one of my complaints is that you've got far more scientists than ever before but the pace of discovery has not increased. Why? Because they're all busy just filling in the details of what they think is the standard story. And the youngsters, the people with different ideas have just as big a fight as ever and normally it takes decades for science to correct itself. But science does correct itself and that's the reason why science is such a glorious thing for our species.
Robyn Williams: Sure. If you take the yardstick of hoaxes where people are actually falsifying their results and famously Hendrick Schoen recently who wrote I think a physics paper every eight days, which is of course virtually impossible and I think after a couple of years he was sprung. Hwang the person working on the stem cells in South Korea, I think it took about the same time, two years.
Nigel Calder: Yes OK, let's be clear. Margaret Mead was not trying to deceive, she was herself deceived by giggling young girls.
Robyn Williams: Young girls who were telling her a story and in fact she hardly spoke the language, which Derek Freeman did.
Nigel Calder: It's a perfectly simple proposition why the top experts are usually wrong. There are only two possibilities: either a particular branch of science is finished, complete, never another discovery to be made, in which case why bother. Or, there are discoveries still to be made and this will mean that what the top experts are saying are either wrong or seriously inadequate. And yet, although we know all this from the history of science, each generation of scientists seems to kid itself that, oh yeah, we know it all and don't pay any attention to those people saying otherwise.
Robyn Williams: Give me a couple of examples of current orthodoxy that you think is somehow errant and will be exposed as such?
Nigel Calder: Oh, one easy one is Richard Dawkins. His account of evolution is hopelessly out of date. There are all kinds of things that happen to genes that just don't figure in his way of thinking: all kinds of ways in which accelerated evolution can occur involving several genes at one time and yet the idea of the single mutation being tested by natural selection, which has been the dogma for what, 70 or 80 years, I mean it's dead, defunct. But the people who are discovering the other things just don't get reported very widely even though they are distinguished scientists themselves. I mean that to me is an example of where a top expert is wrong.
Robyn Williams: Well of course epigenetics is the favourite, the fashionable word these days.
Nigel Calder: Yes, it's beginning to come through.
Robyn Williams: It's the real flavour.
Nigel Calder: Yeah, it's beginning to come through as you say, and I have quite a lot to say about it in my book The Magic Universe, but no, the generality of - what shall we say, genetics departments and certainly the weight of popular literature on the subject hasn't yet caught up. It is catching up as you mentioned with epigenetics and all that.
Robyn Williams: Give me another example. I know the one that you might like to suggest.
Nigel Calder: Well I was holding off actually.
Robyn Williams: Go on, go for it.
Nigel Calder: OK, the other area is climate change where we have a very formidable establishment backed with government power and money dedicated to a particular hypothesis of the causes of the warming in the 20th century, which is seriously challenged by serious scientists. But they are, like so many predecessors in other fields of science, they're having a very tough time. It's hard for them to get funding, it's hard for them to get their work published because the incumbents think they know what's what and don't let anybody tell you different. And this has been one of my main concerns for the past ten years or so, that I was alert to discoveries being made in Denmark which helped to explain how as was well known until the new theory came along, that the Sun plays a major role in climate change and the Danes are starting to find out how the sun controls the climate.
I wrote a book in 1997 called The Manic Sun, which set out the discovery that cosmic rays coming from the stars seem to be involved in the formation of your ordinary, every day clouds and this was done by a Danish physicist called Henrik Svensmark. It was poo pooed and rubbished and Henrik had a terrible time getting funded, getting his work published but eventually he scraped together money to do an experiment which showed just how the cosmic rays affect our cloud cover and that was in 2005. He couldn't get that published for over a year because it wasn't politically correct, and still the battle goes on and he is treated by the mainstream of climate scientists as an outcast. But he and I have written a book together called The Chilling Stars, which tries to set out the story.
Like other discoverers before him, Henrik is flattering the reader. It's worth remembering that Galileo, Darwin and Einstein all took their stories straight to the general public because it was so different. There were no text books; there were no university courses, no experts. At the frontiers of science what scientists think is going on they're no surer of it really than the man in the street and so we are quite happy that people should read the evidence and form their opinion for or against us.
Robyn Williams: Well I must say that there's an interview in the current edition of the magazine from the United States, Discover, in which Henrik Svensmark talks about this very thing and gives some of his ideas about cosmic rays and how it feels to be struggling all the while to get recognised for this work. But Nigel Calder, could you sum up briefly how it is that these cosmic rays might affect cloud formation and therefore are doing something that affects our climate, which we are otherwise mistaking as you say, for CO 2?
Nigel Calder: Well for me it's a wonder of nature that the ordinary clouds you see out of the window, especially the low level clouds require small specks of sulphuric acid on which to condense and the cosmic rays coming from the stars, regulated by the sun, help to make those specks. It's a wonder of nature but it's not politically correct, which makes it all lots of fun.
Robyn Williams: I see. Now you were interviewed when a paper came out by Lockwood, from I think Southampton that was supposed to have looked at the record of the sun over the last 20 years or so, and they discounted that. And David Karoly, who is from the University of Melbourne, a Federation Fellow, who spoke on The Science Show, suggesting that the latest analysis as published by the proceedings of the Royal Society indicated that the cosmic ray story wasn't happening.
Nigel Calder: Well he would say that, wouldn't he. No, look, Lockwood and Fröhlich agree with Svensmark and me that the Sun has played a major role over hundreds of thousands of years. Henrik and I agree with them that the Sun, which was becoming more and more agitated during the 20th century, has stopped becoming more agitated and may even be calming down a bit. Where we disagree, and it's perfectly simple Robyn, they say that in spite of the Sun quietening down a bit, temperatures are still shooting up. That is simply not true; temperatures are not still shooting up. The temperature, by the latest records both from surface stations and from satellites show that the temperatures in 2007 are lower than they were in 1998. Now I won't swing anything on 1998 because that was an exceptional year of the warming in the Pacific called El Nino, but if you look at what's happened since then it's flat, just as the Sun is flat. It's a perfectly simple argument; it's just that the way they present their evidence of the warming they give a wrong picture of continuing warming.
Robyn Williams: Well they are orthodox if you like, as you were implying before, but why would they be blind to such an obvious thing? Why would they all do that in such numbers?
Nigel Calder: Because this is their industry Robyn; you have thousands of scientists whose job it is to churn this stuff out. If they stopped saying, 'Hey, we've got a climate disaster on our hands' they could be out of work.
Robyn Williams: Just do something else surely.
Nigel Calder: No, it's rather the opposite I'm afraid. What I observed is that when people may disagree with our talking, and this includes top scientists like Eugene Parker who discovered the solar wind which governs our environment in space, they just giggle. I mean you either have giggling stern faces or sometimes just shouting. It's a funny business. I mean what it all comes down to, is that scientists are not the perfect reasoning individuals they might like to think they are. They're human beings and in all human activity you get personality clashes, you get fights about this and that, differences of opinion and science is not really all that different. But for me the job of a sharp science reporter is to find your way through this hubbub and find out what the real evidence is and whose story to tell. It's very easy to go along to the press conferences, read the official reports and all the rest of it and report to the mainstream. It's harder to dig around and find out what the other points of view are.
Robyn Williams: Yes, I think you're probably dead right, in fact the machinery for putting over the orthodox view through what a friend of mine in the United States calls 'spoon fed journalism' where you're just a conduit for the official state. But nonetheless, are you not daunted by the sheer weight of the alternative opinion, the orthodox opinion on climate? I mean there's an awful lot of it.
Nigel Calder: Look, science is not a democratic process, I have in my time been criticised for saying that black holes might exist, the continents move, that an asteroidal comet wiped out the dinosaurs. I've been strongly criticised for saying these things because nobody else believed it you know, but it's now standard stuff.
Robyn Williams: Yes, chance your arm, imagine you know 20 years time, what might we be saying about having the collywobbles on climate then do you think, in something like 2027?
Nigel Calder: Oh, there will be hundreds of PhD's in the history of science tracing exactly how it was that a particular hypothesis, that global warming might be due to carbon dioxide, became a religion which was taken up, not just by some scientists but by journalists I have to say, and by politicians.
Robyn Williams: But religion applies a belief in some sort of deity, some spiritual system.
Nigel Calder: It's like a religion if you consider anybody who questions it to be an unspeakable heretic, which is roughly the situation now. I mean look at what's happened when you put out The Great Global Warming Swindle on ABC, there were just howls of outrage as though the devil incarnate was roaming the streets.
Robyn Williams: Well that's because a third of it was highly questionable and some people who have been involved in it were cross. Do you think it was a good film?
Nigel Calder: Yes, I mean the interesting thing is that the criticisms have not been directed against what the eminent scientists who took part were saying. There were arguments about some of the graphics and the narration when it was shown over here, but you've got a string of professors saying we don't believe this stuff.
Robyn Williams: I think we can always find professors who say they don't believe in something or other.
Robyn Williams: Yes, so are you going to use that as an argument for not listening to any other points of view?
Robyn Williams: No, the Royal Society put out a very clear examination of each point of various things to do with melting and temperature rise and the lag factor and the answers were put out in a very professional way I would have thought, by Bob Ward and a few other people.
Robyn Williams: Yes, they're professional thought police of the global warming industry. Just because it's put out by the Royal Society has no significance these days because they have become totally politicised about this subject.
Robyn Williams: Would Martin Rees allow that to happen do you think, because he's president of the Royal Society and I would have thought a tremendously responsible person?
Robyn Williams: Look, I have said to Martin I'm sorry to see that you think science is a democratic process. Just because lots of scientists are saying that it's all man made that doesn't mean that it's necessarily true. And he said, Oh well, because there are so many of them we've got to pay attention haven't we - end of story. But I mean it was exactly the same with all the other things that we've mentioned going back to Galileo, the opposite view to the current fashion always had a hard time.
Robyn Williams: Yes. My final question is really, Nigel Calder what are you going to do next, what's your current project?
Robyn Williams: I'm thinking about doing a book about the new story of evolution, which is, as I mentioned, quite different from the old single gene story. Or I'm interested in alternatives to string theory, which is the great theory of physics which has been fashionable for 30 years and has got nowhere about trying to describe the universe as a whole. There are quite contrary ideas about that and I think they may be worth a book.
Robyn Williams: Nigel Calder, whose books about science are as encyclopædic as they are readable - and challenging. And I note that the editor of the journal Science, Don Kennedy, in his editorial about climate change on 27 July, head it: Game Over, and goes on: 'We have abruptly passed the tipping point in what until recently has been a tense political controversy. Judgements are in and the game is over' he says, assuring us that warming is ON and the cause is US. Other journals say the same.