I had an interesting week on Facebook. Two news items in the press produced a flurry of postings on the estimable site, the first being a column by Maurice Newman in The Australian which alleged the UN's climate change campaign was part of plan for world government and the other being the decision by the University of Western Australia to not host a "consensus centre" helmed by sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg. There were calls for Newman to be sacked as an advisor to the government and the rejection of Lomborg was hailed as a triumph over "climate change deniers."
I should not have been surprised at the vehemence with which Newman and Lomborg were attacked, after all in my 1999 book Mind Wars I wrote of how complex, integrated thought systems such as religions and political theories incorporated tenets designed to silence critics. Those tenets provided a protective shell for the doctrine by characterising all critics or doubters as ignorant, unintelligent, mentally ill, devious, corrupt or just plain evil. The designated responses to critics and apostates was to mock them, pity them, lock them up or in some cases kill them but, at any cost, silence them. The imperative was to stop the 'contagion of doubt' from spreading to other believers. The examples I drew on when writing Mind Wars were Christians hanging and burning heretics, the Soviet Union confining political dissidents to psychiatric hospitals, Scientologists suing people and Nazis burning books. Were I writing the book today, I would have had further striking examples in radical Moslems beheading non-Moslems or even Moslems of different sects and the vilification of anyone who questions "global warming."
We are all shocked by the savagery with which groups like IS massacre their opponents or commit random terror attacks on western targets. We are less surprised by the vehemence with which environmentalists, or people who regard themselves as small g greens, will attack anyone who raises doubts on the theory of global warming and climate change. This is presumably because no-one has actually killed a climate change denier as yet. But although the climate change controversy has not led to murder, it has produced calls for so-called climate change deniers to be prevented from broadcasting or publishing their views, to be sued, dismissed from official positions, or even jailed. These remedies, virtually unknown in a society that lauds free speech, are seen by the fanatics who propose them as justified because the deniers are, they maintain, endangering the entire future of the planet. In other words, the only way to save the planet is for everyone to accept the theory of global warming, unquestioningly.
Now there's nothing wrong with accepting a theory. It's the word "unquestioningly" that is worrying.
As I have pointed out in a more extended piece on global warming on my website, the issue of global warming actually breaks down to a whole series of separate questions. The question of whether the Earth is warming is quite separate from the question of whether humans are causing it; which is a separate question again from whether the warming, if it exists, is likely to continue and if so to what extent. Then there is another set of questions as to whether such warming would have good or bad effects and whether it is possible to halt, or slow the warming, and if so, how.
To the climate bigot however, the answers to all these questions are known, and there is no further discussion to be had.
Bjorn Lomborg, for example, is not a climate change denier but has written extensively suggesting that perhaps the money being spent (in my view, wasted) on abating emissions, and inefficient alternative energies, might be better spent alleviating poverty, providing education and so on. These comparatively mild suggestions induce a white-hot hatred amongst the climate bigots, who denounce him as a denier and a pawn of the "polluters" and political conservatives.
This is to be expected. Climate bigots, like all bigots, are ignorant and incapable of independent thought. In this sense they are not unlike the young men who flock to join the Taliban or IS. As was put succinctly by a journalist recently, in many countries, young Moslem men are taught their religion by rote but never given the analytical skills to evaluate it. It is precisely that absence of analytical skills which gives rise to the absolutism of the global warming alarmists.
Although we pride ourselves on having a better education system than the Middle East, it turns out that millions of people in the western world also lack the ability to analyse information that is presented to them. This is largely because they are persuaded by a series of tactics used by the "imams" in the belief system. Those tactics include, for example, labelling and misrepresenting opponents. Initially people who questioned the theory of runaway global warming were labelled "sceptics" but "sceptic" sounded too much like someone with a considered view. This was soon changed to "climate change denier" which had overtones of "Holocaust denier." Of course no one is denying that climates change: the climate sceptic's most usual contention is precisely that, since climates do change all the time, it is impossible to any change to human activity. Note also that the term "global warming" was quickly replaced by "climate change". Global warming had the unfortunate quality of appearing to be disproved when an extreme blizzard occurred. Calling it climate change meant that any weather event could be blamed on human activity. Carbon dioxide, which as also seen as an "opponent" was also defamed by being labelled a "pollutant." I have even seen scientific papers were CO2 emissions were falsely referred to as pollution. This of course is ridiculous as CO2 is not only a natural part of the atmosphere, but the basic building block of all life on Earth.
The next tactic was the creation of a false consensus. By using a completely biased survey method, a research fellow at University of Queensland was able to arrive at a statistic that "97% of climate scientists" accepted the theory of global warming. While such a finding should have been obviously seen as a confection, it was instead to become repeated as catechism throughout the environmentalist community, providing even more material for the climate bigots.
The most outrageous, yet most readily believed piece of propaganda, was that those who questioning the tenets of climate change were either paid propagandists of big business, scientifically ignorant or even "anti-science". The fact that many of the people questioning the theory of global warming were working scientists and environmentalists like Bob Carter, Lord Monckton and Patrick Moore, was not seen as contradicting this particular slur.
The clincher or course was to invest the entire issue with political significance. Historically very few scientific debates have had political implications though some have had enormous religious repercussions - Copernicus and Darwin being the most striking examples. Science, however, can be co-opted and distorted for political purpose as it was by the Nazis in their theories of racial superiority and the Marxists in their assertion of the scientific inevitability of Communism. Very early in the piece, the environmentalist linked global warming to the industrialisation of the west. Even though one of the greatest sources of CO2 on Earth is people in the developing world cooking on open fires, the classic image of "carbon pollution" was a row of chimneys pouring out white smoke (which was usually steam). This was clever, as many climate bigots were already economic bigots. That is to say that they believe people in business are inherently greedy and selfish, that industries pollute the world willy-nilly, that capitalism exploits workers at home and abroad, that big business encourages and even causes wars, and so on and so on. To tell these political, social and economic bigots that the business community might actually destroy all life on Earth in its heedless quest for profits was music to their ears. From that moment on, the war against global warming and the war against capitalism became the same war. And since conservative governments were typically seen as being "friends" of business (how awful!) then they were the enemy too. Thus, a once fairly obscure theory about the relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and world climate suddenly managed to unite anti-capitalists, anti-conservatives, socialists and environmentalists into one mega-movement. Change even became as feminist issue since capitalism and industry were inherently patriarchal.
Next: Is global warming alarmism part of a Left-wing UN plot?
