A Classic Example Of Groupthink Dissected
It is worth returning to that letter in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, criticising Booker’s global warming groupthink article:
SIR – I agree with Christopher Booker that people tend to adopt the views of their “group” without checking facts or using critical thinking.
Nevertheless, his article contains inaccuracies. A big one: that climate change theory was immediately hailed as a scientific consensus.
In fact, it has been challenged, disagreed with, tested, refined, disagreed with some more and, after two decades, a sort of scientific consensus has emerged. However, Mr. Booker uses the scientific uncertainty, and the one case of deliberate misuse of data, to try to argue against the facts.
Mr. Booker seems to be saying that a small group of scientists has pulled off a hoax of massive proportions that flies in the face of the “real” data, which he doesn’t present. He says that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is corrupt, meteorologists are incompetent, and the 200 countries who have independently researched this are all wrong. The only world leader to point to the truth is that well-known intellectual and world-renowned scientist Donald J Trump.
Simon Foster
Cincinnati, Ohio
The more you read it, the more you realize that Simon Foster has himself fallen into the same groupthink, which he denies exists.
Let’s look closely at some of his claims:
1) Climate change was not “hailed as a scientific consensus” from the start.
It is hard to see how this statement could be further from the truth.
Based on no more than theory, the whole global bandwagon was set rolling, with almost indecent haste and incredible momentum.
It was as long ago as 1988 that the IPCC was originally set up, largely due to the machinations of people like Maurice Strong and Bert Bolin. Two years later the Hadley Centre opened.
In the US in 1989, the Union of Concerned Scientists organized a petition urging for the recognition of global warming as “potentially the greatest danger faced by mankind.”
By 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed by 154 countries at the Rio Earth Summit, committing all to a voluntary reduction of GHGs, with the aim of “preventing dangerous anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate system.”
This, in turn, led to the Kyoto Treaty in 1997.
The whole idea that all of this happened without a deep and wide consensus, both scientific and political, is absurd.
2) In fact, it has been challenged, disagreed with, tested, refined, disagreed with some more and, after two decades, a sort of scientific consensus has emerged.
Nobody is suggesting that the science has not been refined in the last twenty years. (Curiously though, it always seems to have been to the conclusion that “it is worse than we thought!”) After all, climate scientists have got to come up with something to justify the billions they get in research funding every year.
Nevertheless, despite real-world observations continuing to diverge from the theory, the consensus that existed twenty years ago is little changed.
In reality, there have been many scientists over the years who have disagreed, and most still do. However, they have been sidelined by groupthink.
3) Mr Booker seems to be saying that a small group of scientists have pulled off a hoax of massive proportions
What Foster ignores is the corrupting influence of industrial-scale grant funding. And, as we have already seen, the IPCC, UNFCCC and the rest were set up with indecent haste, based on the flimsiest of evidence, and coordinated by a very small group of people.
4) He says that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is corrupt
Many would argue that the IPCC has shown itself to be corrupt by its very own actions.
In any event, the IPCC is the creature of governments and was expressly set up to provide evidence for “human-induced” climate change and assess its impact. As ever with government-sponsored inquiries, it produced the results its masters were looking for.
The IPCC certainly cannot be regarded as in any way independent or objective.
5) He says meteorologists are incompetent
This is a bit of an own goal by Simon Foster.
In 2013, the AMS surveyed its member meteorologists and found that less than half agreed that global warming was mostly human-caused.
It is a fact that there are many skeptical meteorologists, as opposed to climatologists, out there who are not convinced by the “consensus”.
6) He says the 200 countries who have independently researched this are all wrong.
He seems to be confusing this with the countries who have signed the Paris Agreement, which of course is two different things entirely.
Leaving that aside though, it is the “million housewives can’t be wrong” argument. Science is not decided by consensus, no matter what groupthink dictates.
As we have seen, this supposed consensus does not even exist anyway. And the idea that all of this research is somehow “independent” ignores the realities of funding and groupthink, which will quickly quash any research critical of the central tenets of AGW.
7) Trump
His final comment about Trump simply shows how politicised climate science has become.
Simon Foster has fallen into the trap of groupthink, probably quite unwittingly, and hardly surprisingly either as a result of the constant disinformation fed to him for years by the climate establishment.
Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That
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Ken Hughes
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Quite right. I base my understandings on the likes of “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, a documentary produced for the UK Channel 4, and the now deceased Dr. Bob Carter. I find the points presented by these and others of like mind to be substantiated by the real science and the arguments presented by the AGW alarmists to be, at the very best, imaginative. The whole message from the alarmists is to tell us what to believe and to brand Those who do not accept it as “Deniers”. This in itself is evidence of the mammoth lie.
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