I have had enough brushes with eccentrics who think I am going to destroy the world with the Large Hadron Collider to appreciate that in scientific fields where many lives and dollars are genuinely at stake, pressures can be enormous and cool scientific discourse is hard to find and maintain. In such fields, pressures don’t just come from eccentrics and obsessives, but from smart and well-funded lobby groups. I have enormous respect and sympathy for those scientists who work in such areas, under intense commercial, political and moral pressures.
One such area is climate science. I’m writing this basically because the Institute of Physics, of which I am a Fellow, has waded in to the so-called “climate wars” recently; once with a statement before Copenhagen and more recently in “evidence” to the Science and Technology Committee.
