Newark Advertiser reader’s letter: Science is never settled

In his most recent Newark Advertiser letter Backing Up Climate Views (News Views, February 18) M. Bassey draws readers’ attention to the position of the historic Royal Society on the subject of climate change.

He fails to mention their position that scientific truths, which are discovered by hypothesis testing, should be established by the political process of consensus instead.

In 2001, former Royal Society President Lord Robert May helped organise a statement published in Science magazine that there was a scientific consensus on the danger of human-caused global warming.

On January 26 2006 he was the keynote speaker at the clandestine BBC seminar held behind closed doors between company senior staff and climate activists, which concluded that the debate on climate change was over and that they should ‘stop reporting the views of climate sceptics’.

The American Physical Society is an equivalent body to our Royal Society and (one might argue) equally eminent.

In 2010, after 67 years of membership, Professor Emiritus of physics Hal Lewis penned a public letter of resignation as a result of what he termed “the global warming scam”, and went on “with (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist”.

Mr Bassey does not have a monopoly on fearing for the lives of grandchildren.

I share that fear and concern, but not because of the state of the planet, that is beyond man’s ability to control.

My concern is for the mental health of our very young children who are being fed fear in schools and universities on the basis of inaccurate computer modelling championed by the Royal Society, etc.

I am fearful that they are denied the ability and opportunity to listen to argument, think and reason for themselves and reach credible conclusions, basically what every good scientist and engineer does because science is never settled. — C. Southgate, Coddington.