How Corrupted Science Poisoned Society

Climate science and climate politics have become corrupt and unleashed a cult

I had been unconvinced of the climate change narrative since the earliest days. When the global warming circus opened for business in the 1980s, we were just coming off the back of the alarm over the hole in the ozone layer, so a second atmospheric emergency in the space of a few years seemed just a little too much of a coincidence.

However, it was only the advent of the internet that confirmed my suspicions that climate science had a problem. I still remember dialling up on a modem – in the wee small hours, when there was more bandwidth – to visit a site called Still Waiting for Greenhouse, where the first climate sceptics used to convene. One particular story that struck a chord with me concerned a scientific assessment of warming on Australia. Computer simulations had confirmed, or so it was said, that Australia would see a dramatic increase in rainfall. However, when sceptics pointed out that this would be an unalloyed good in such a dry country, new simulations quickly appeared, overturning the previously settled science and demonstrating, no doubt conclusively, that rainfall would disappear almost entirely. Now I felt for sure that there was a problem.

It’s hard to make an empirical case that the climate is deteriorating. Hydrologists have understood for thousands of years that weather patterns change constantly. Indeed, we now know that they exhibit trends on all timescales, from hours, to years, decades, centuries, millennia and beyond. That being the case, the few decades of warming seen recently don’t look anything out of the ordinary, and other ways of frightening the populace must be found.

One of the earliest ideas market-tested by the alarmists was to try to convince the public that mankind was definitely affecting the climate – a case of ‘never mind that the weather changes naturally all the time, now humans are changing it’. In 1995, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its second assessment of the world’s climate, it claimed that it had detected “discernible human influence on global climate“, in the shape of a strong warming of the atmosphere high above the tropics. So thrilled was the media with this ‘fingerprint’ of mankind’s guilt that even the subsequent revelation that the finding fell apart if the old data used were brought up to date did nothing to dim that enthusiasm. Sceptics, on the other hand, now knew that something was badly wrong.

Buoyed by their success with the ‘fingerprint in the sky’, the IPCC’s Third Assessment went further, trying to convince the public that the world was hotter than it had ever been before, or at least that it was hotter than the Medieval Warm Period, a staple of sceptic objections to the global warming narrative. Climate science’s poster child to do this was the Hockey Stick graph, a now infamous scientific concoction representing Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the last 800 years. For most of that period, there had apparently been a steady cooling, but then, at the dawn of the 20th century, there was a sudden switch to warming, with unprecedented levels reached by the 1980s.

The IPCC clearly saw the graph as a weapon, placing it front and centre in the Third Assessment Report and in the press conference that launched it. It went on to become an icon of the global warming movement – apparently incontrovertible evidence that mankind was wrecking the planet.

But if the rise of the Hockey Stick was spectacular, the fall from grace of the graph itself and of the scientist behind it, one Professor Michael Mann, was just as extraordinary. The tale has been told elsewhere, but for our purposes suffice it to say that through years of doggedly determined research, two Canadians – retired mining engineer Steve McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick – revealed that the hockey stick shape of the final graph was a function of data that was entirely spurious – comically so – and an invalid statistical analysis.

But more important than the fact of shattering of the IPCC’s icon was the reaction of the scientific community – not just those directly involved in climatic research, but those who might have brought relevant expertise from other fields, and also those working in scientific publishing and institutions. Nobody but nobody, it seemed, dared to criticise the Hockey Stick or indeed to accept that it was flawed. Indeed, the reaction was exactly the opposite – to circle the wagons and to insist that the graph was valid, and that McIntyre and McKitrick had nefarious motivations. This was no easy task. So daft were the data behind Mann’s results and so catastrophic his calculations, the scientific establishment was reduced to making the ludicrous argument that despite these obvious failings, he had still reached the correct answer.

The failure of scientists to speak out about the Hockey Stick would have appeared strange to many, but not to those familiar with the ways of climate scientists. It had long been clear that anything other than total support for the narrative of catastrophic global warming was considered taboo in scientific circles. Just how little deviation from orthodoxy was considered acceptable, and just how strong a grip the climate mafia’s omertà had on those making a living in the field became clear in a 2008 statement by Joanne Simpson, a pioneer of the field, issued shortly after her retirement:

Since I am no longer affiliated with any organisation nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. … The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models.

That she had been too scared to say something so mild while working for the US government speaks volumes.

Another scientist, Roger Pielke Jr., who was committed to the idea of manmade climate change but who had the temerity to point out that there was no sign of it in the data on hurricanes, found himself moved from the large comfortable office he had previously enjoyed into a windowless cupboard, And then, when he failed to take the hint, found even that filled with a growing pile of junk-filled boxes. As the eminent hydrologist Demetris Koutsoyiannis explained, “diversity in scientific opinion is now strictly prohibited”, or, as another wag put it: “The opposite of diversity is university.”

Any lingering doubts that climate science was utterly corrupt should have been put to bed by then, and if they hadn’t, events at the end of 2009 would have sealed the deal. On the eve of the Green Blob’s annual climate conference, thousands of emails between some of the world’s most prominent climatologists, including the team behind the Hockey Stick, were leaked onto the internet. Climategate, as the affair was dubbed, revealed the depths to which the field had sunk: nobbling of journals, silencing of critics, fixing data to give desired answers – it went on and on. In one extraordinary email, it was suggested that everyone in climate science knew the Hockey Stick was baloney. In another, a climatologist asked “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.” These were extraordinary revelations at a time when the world was being told that Mann’s work had received a clean bill of health and that the science of climate change was ‘settled’.

The world was scandalised; so much so that, for a few short months at least, sceptic voices were occasionally heard in the media. But then the scientific and bureaucratic establishments closed ranks and a systematic coverup began. No fewer than six inquiries were set up, on both sides of the Atlantic, and by dint of careful selection of panel members (no known sceptics), tight control over what was examined (nothing that had been criticised) and an absolute refusal to take evidence from those, like Mcintyre and McKitrick, who had been the chief critics of the Hockey Stick, all managed to reach roughly the same conclusion – ‘Nothing to see here, move along’.

The idea of manmade global warming may have started as real science, but the field was quickly overwhelmed by other forces. Scientists saw the arguments for climate catastrophe as delivering funding beyond their wildest dreams. Politicians saw it as a way to manipulate electorates and deliver power and wealth, as the rags to riches story of Al Gore makes clear. Their chief weapon in this regard was a fearful narrative of climate disaster, but as it was deployed more frequently and the predictions became more frightening, its progenitor lost control. It took on a life of its own, becoming in essence the foundation of a secular religion – a cult, in other words – complete with ‘holy’ texts, red-robed Extinction Rebellion priests and a girl prophetess in the shape of Greta Thunberg.

It’s hard to express how dangerous this is for our society. Cult members respond to primeval emotions, their thought processes bypassing the rational mind entirely. Driven by fear of cataclysm and in pursuit of redemption, they can and will inflict astonishing cruelty on others. Think the Spanish Inquisition, think Mao, Pol Pot and the Nazis.

Cults can and will corrupt institutions, civic, political, legal and scientific. My friend Professor Michael Kelly has tried for many years to get the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering – he is a fellow of both – to hold meetings on climate science and Net Zero that challenge the current ‘consensus’, but has been blanked at every step. These bodies, along with all the other scientific institutions, now seek to further the interests of the cult rather than science.

The media have mostly been corrupted too. Most outlets have long since banned sceptics from their output. The BBC even convened a seminar of what it said were “leading scientists” to justify the policy, but were left looking corrupt when internet sleuths uncovered the names of those in attendance, almost all of whom were environmental activists. There is barely even a pretence of even-handedness in most of the media. I recently asked the magazine of the Institute of Civil Engineers if I could write an op-ed responding to a piece it had published criticising Kemi Badenoch’s new-found scepticism about the feasibility of Net Zero. The response was that the editors would be pleased to have an article discussing how Net Zero might be delivered more cheaply, but that they would not countenance anything that questioned the wisdom of the target. The legendary physicist Richard Feynman once said he’d rather have questions that couldn’t be answered than answers that couldn’t be questioned. I agree, and Net Zero is clearly an example of the latter.

The Civil Service is entirely in the grip of the climate cult too. I have spent years trying to get Whitehall to correct its preposterous statements about the cost of renewables. But despite the existence of hard data refuting their claims, both ministers and officials simply blank any such demand. It’s as if they think their feelings about the climate outweigh any concerns about data, facts and the truth.

If a cult is what we are facing, we need to understand the threat it represents. A historical example gives a flavour of what we might expect. In South Africa in 1856 the Xhosa tribe fell into the grip of a cult led by a charismatic girl called Nongqawuse: the Greta Thunberg of her day. She persuaded the elders that if they slaughtered the cattle herds that were the basis of the economy and burnt down the granaries, everything would be miraculously reincarnated: ‘new people’ would come with ‘new cattle’. Suffice it to say this didn’t end well. Closer to our time, the murderous excesses of communist and fascist societies can be seen as a manifestation of the same phenomenon. Ed Miliband’s idea, aired as I write, of installing small wind turbines across the country is painfully reminiscent of the backyard steel furnaces installed during China’s perversely misnamed ‘Great Leap Forward’, a bid to collectivise agriculture and industrialise society in the space of just a few short years, after a cult had formed around the country’s revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung. Millions died before more rational actors gained the upper hand again.

For years, I couldn’t understand why society appeared to have lost its collective mind. Why were we throwing away our cheap and reliable energy sources in favour of windmills and solar panels? It was surely madness. But now I know: climate science and climate politics have become corrupt, and together have unleashed a cult, infecting society with irrationality and silencing everyone who tries to stand against it. The results are plain to see. As our economy sinks ever further into the mire, and as Mr Miliband pushes ever harder to make sure it sinks entirely, we should be very worried. But at least we know that, as and when the lights go out, we can point the finger at the climate scientists who started us down this road.

Andrew Montford is the Director of Net Zero Watch and author of The Hockey Stick Illusion, a history of the rise and fall of the infamous climate graph.