naive

However, I'm inclined to think that he isn't a tosser, just naive (as someone said, I don't think Tim understands the policy world very well). He looks a bit naive in his picture, doesn't he? And that is a sure-fire way to tell. But maybe that is me being naive. Well, let me tell you and you can make up your own mind. Assuming you can be bothered, go off and read his piece in Nature: 2 °C or not 2 °C? That is the climate question (you ought to; please don't rely on my biased reporting of him :-). Tim has a laudable aim: he wants to ensure that global efforts to tackle the climate problem…
The "Institute of Physics" sounds jolly reassuring; but like all such things you never quite know what they are going to say. Just recently they have been saying some very silly things indeed in their contribution to the UK parliaments feeding-frenzy over the CRU emails. So the IOP apparently thinks that worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and it goes downhill from there. It reads like a gift to the septics and it could easily have been written down to the septics dictation; indeed, it very probably was. So the most likely scenario is that a…