Groupthink How Science Can Shed New Light on the Most Important ‘Non-Debate’ of Our Time Christopher Booker
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GLOBAL WARMING A case study in groupthink How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time Christopher Booker The Global Warming Policy Foundation GWPF Report 28 GWPF REPORTS Views expressed in the publications of the Global Warming Policy Foundation are those of the authors, not those of the GWPF, its Academic Advisory Coun- cil members or its directors THE GLOBAL WARMING POLICY FOUNDATION Director Benny Peiser BOARD OF TRUSTEES Lord Lawson (Chairman) Peter Lilley Lord Donoughue Charles Moore Lord Fellowes Baroness Nicholson Rt Revd Dr Peter Forster, Bishop of Chester Graham Stringer MP Sir Martin Jacomb Lord Turnbull ACADEMIC ADVISORY COUNCIL Professor Christopher Essex (Chairman) Professor Ross McKitrick Sir Samuel Brittan Professor Robert Mendelsohn Sir Ian Byatt Professor Garth Paltridge Dr John Constable Professor Ian Plimer Professor Vincent Courtillot Professor Paul Reiter Professor Freeman Dyson Dr Matt Ridley Christian Gerondeau Sir Alan Rudge Professor Larry Gould Professor Nir Shaviv Professor William Happer Professor Henrik Svensmark Professor David Henderson Professor Anastasios Tsonis Professor Terence Kealey Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Professor Deepak Lal Dr David Whitehouse Professor Richard Lindzen CREDITS Cover image The Blind Leading the Blind ©Aleutie/Shutterstock GLOBAL WARMING A case study in groupthink How science can shed new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time Christopher Booker ISBN 978-0-9931190-0-2 © Copyright 2018 The Global Warming Policy Foundation Contents Foreword vii About the author viii Author’s personal note viii Executive summary xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Janis’s theory of groupthink 2 3 The three rules of groupthink 3 4 The power of second-hand thinking 5 5 Global warming and the archetype of groupthink 6 6 The ‘idea whose time had come’ 18 7 The IPCC breaks its own rules: the ‘consensus’ survives its first major scandal 20 8 The ‘consensus’ fudges the evidence 23 9 When groupthink meets the outside world 26 10 The ‘consensus’ and the media 31 11 Hysteria reaches its height 35 12 The story begins to change: dissenting voices 38 13 Groupthink and wishful thinking 44 14 Where did the ‘consensus’ get its ‘facts’? 49 15 Groupthink defends its own 52 16 Aftermath of the crisis, 2010–2014 54 17 Prelude to Paris: ‘adjusting’ the facts to fit the theory (again) 67 v 18 Paris 2015: a final ‘triumph’ for groupthink 70 19 The real global warming disaster: how groupthink shaped the po- litical response 74 20 The peculiar case of the United Kingdom 76 21 President Trump finally calls the groupthink’s bluff 80 22 Conclusions: what happens when the groupthink does meet reality? 82 23 A personal epilogue: the wider picture 93 Notes 96 Foreword By Professor Richard Lindzen The bizarre issue of climate catastrophism has been around sufficiently long that it has become possible to trace its history in detail, and, indeed, several excellent re- cent books do this, placing the issue in the context of a variety of environmental, economic and political trends. Darwall’s Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex and Lewin’s Searching for the Catastrophe Signal: The Origins of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change deserve special mention in this connection. Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but pro- foundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, con- tradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker con- vincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a ma- jor role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’. Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world. The situation everywhere has been reinforced by the existence of numerous individuals and groups that have profited mightily from the hysteria (including academia, where funding predicated on sup- porting alarm has increased by a factor of about 15–20 in the US), but why so many others have gone along, despite the obvious disadvantages of doing so, deserves the attention that Booker provides. Professor Lindzen was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Masschusetts Insti- tute of Technology until his retirement in 2013. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of GWPF. vii About the author Christopher Booker has been writing on climate change and energy issues in the Sun- day Telegraph and elsewhere over the past 11 years. In 2010 his history of the science and politics of global warming, The Real Global Warming Disaster: is the obsession with climate change turning into one of the most costly scientific blunders in history? was ranked by The Bookseller as one of the UK’s three top best-selling books on the envi- ronment in the previous decade, alongside titles by Al Gore and James Lovelock. Born in 1937, he read history at Cambridge and was the founding editor of Private Eye between 1961 and 1963. His other books have included The Neophiliacs: a study of the revolution in English life in the Fifties and Sixties (1969), The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories, a psychological analysis of storytelling (2004), The Great Deception, a history of the European Union (co-written with Dr Richard North), and Scared to Death: Why scares are costing us the earth (2007). In 1979 he made an acclaimed BBC television documentary, City of Towers, tracing the crucial influence of Le Corbusier on the post- war redevelopment of Britain’s cities. Author’s personal note Having now written extensively about the global warming issue for over a decade, I kick myself that I did not discover the book that inspired this paper until 2014. When I finally came across Irving Janis’s seminal analysis of ‘groupthink’, I realised justhow much more it helped to explain about the story I and many others had been following for so long. In particular, if I had known about it when in 2009 I published my history of the great alarm over manmade climate change, The Real Global Warming Disaster, it might have been a very different book. Here, more briefly, I look at that story again, brought up to date, but thistime showing how Janis’s theory adds a whole new dimension to our understanding of one of the most remarkable and puzzling episodes in the history of both science and politics. viii It is only by obtaining some sort of insight into the psychology of crowds that it can be understood how powerless they are to hold any opinions other than those which are imposed upon them. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd As long as one is within a certain phenomenology, one is not astonished and no one wonders what it is all about. Such philosophical doubt only comes to one who is outside the game. C.G. Jung, Psychology and National Problems ix Executive summary By any measure, the belief that the earth faces an unprecedented threat from ‘human- induced climate change’ has been one of the most extraordinary episodes in the his- tory of either science or politics. It has led scientists and politicians to contemplate nothing less than a complete revolution in the way mankind sources the energy re- quired to keep modern industrial civilisation functioning, by phasing out the fossil- fuels on which that civilisation has been built. But for 30 years the way this has all come about has given expert observers cause for increasing puzzlement. In particular they have questioned: • the speed with which the belief that human carbon dioxide emissions were causing the world dangerously to warm came to be proclaimed as being shared by a ‘consensus’ of the world’s climate scientists; • the nature and reliability of much of the evidence being cited to support that belief; • the failure of global temperatures to rise in accordance with the predictions of the computer models on which the ‘consensus’ ultimately rested. But there was also the peculiarly hostile and dismissive nature of the response by supporters of the ‘consensus’ to those who questioned all this, a group that included many eminent scientists and other experts. The purpose of this paper is to use the scientific insights of a professor of psychol- ogy at Yale back in the 1970s to show the entire story of the alarm over global warm- ing in a remarkable new light. The late Professor Irving Janis analysed what happens when people get caught up in what he termed ‘groupthink’, a pattern of collective psychological behaviour with three distinctive features, that we can characterise as rules. • A group of people come to share a particular view or belief without a proper appraisal of the evidence. • This leads them to insist that their belief is shared by a ‘consensus’ of all right- minded opinion. • Because their belief is ultimately only subjective, resting on shaky foundations, they then defend it only by displaying an irrational, dismissive hostility towards anyone daring to question it. This paper begins by showing how strongly all these three symptoms were in ev- idence, right from the start, when, in the late 1980s, the belief that a rise in carbon dioxide levels was causing the earth dangerously to warm was first brought to the world’s attention.