#Horizon science academy fight series#
This reality TV show operates on several levels of unpleasantness: the "tools" were recruited under false pretences, thinking they were entering a Britain's Ultimate Lad competition their "toolishness" seemed to incorporate several problems, including drink, drug and anger issues, perhaps not best addressed by a series of humiliating challenges its presenter, Rick Edwards, comes across as almost as much of a tool as his unsalvageable charges. Tool Academy (E4) must have an audience made up entirely of couch-bound people whose remote batteries died while they were watching Glee. On one level, the scientists v idiots debate is a mere distraction, one destined to be overtaken by events, but in the meantime it demeans us all. Nurse issued a call to scientists to be more politically savvy in the wake of the so-called Climategate affair, and to make more of an effort to put data in the public domain. Later, the programme featured an HIV-positive man who doesn't believe HIV causes Aids and follows a yoghurt-based treatment of his own devising, who probably didn't like being lumped in with Delingpole much. When Nurse presented him with a perfectly reasonable analogy about having cancer and choosing a remedy of one's own devising over the "consensus" treatment, Delingpole was clearly offended by the apparent comparison to devotees of quack medicine. In the other, he condemns the scientific consensus on global warming – and consensus in general – as unscientific. In one he explains that he never reads peer-reviewed scientific literature on the subject of global warming because "it's not my job". To be fair, there are two scenes where he looks like an idiot. Nurse's interview with Delingpole was notable for forming a centrepiece to the programme, and because Delingpole complained he was stitched up on his blog, claiming that a good three hours of him being reasonable and cogent was edited out in favour of one scene where he looks like an idiot. One hates to draw conclusions about the wrongheadedness of the views of a climate change-denier such as, say, James Delingpole, simply because he has an unfortunate manner, but that's my job. TV is chiefly driven by personality, and the chief personality on display, Sir Paul Nurse, came across as enthusiastic, open-minded and eminently reasonable. There was never going to be enough room to supply the ammunition with which to overwhelm the doubters and deniers. Under the circumstances, it's a shame Horizon is only a TV show, and not a four-year degree course in climatology.
But you can't go far wrong completely disregarding what half of Americans think about anything.
They face political and financial pressures, which could undermine their purest aims. In my own mind I tend to characterise this debate as "scientists v idiots" and, although I accept it's more complicated than that, this remains my official position. Suspicion of the scientific consensus is not necessarily a minority viewpoint (half of Americans believe climate change is exaggerated) or an expressly political one – people who hate GM crops are rarely on the same side of the left-right divide as people who think climate change is a myth. The problem, he said, was "not just a clash of ideas, but whether the public actually trusts scientists". He cited several areas of contention: global warming and genetically modified crops among them.
I n last night's Horizon: Science Under Attack (BBC2), Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel-winning geneticist and president of the Royal Society, sought to understand and address the public's increasing lack of faith in science.
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