The Collapsing Minds of the ‘Collapsing Climate’ Cult: Part I – Introduction
Repeat after me: “We don’t know”
James Corbett, the indefatigable proprietor of the eponymous Corbett Report, has been recently punching the air in celebration of “The Stunning Collapse of the Climate Scam”. And, in a pre-emptive strike to stop people from accusing him of being naïve, he firmly instructed his readers not to patronise him: he knows precisely how psyops work. He is fully aware that the climate agenda isn’t over yet, but believes that we can, and bally well should, celebrate the “significant blow” that has been dealt to it in recent years.
Pff, I say. I’m afraid Mr Corbett is going to have to forgive me for raining on his climate parade, but here in the UK, Witchfinder General Chris Packham took to the pulpit this summer to tell his congregation of ‘climate collapse’ believers that he has “been fantasising this year that we could perhaps criminalise climate denial”. Perhaps indeed. Today Tomás de Torquemada is perhaps-ing about punishing thought criminals, and tomorrow I’m eating porridge in Belmarsh. Isn’t that how these things happen, perhaps?
First off, let me make it clear that I remain in awe of Mr Corbett’s tenacity in hurling proverbial grenades into the psychopathic ruling class’s lie factory. However, I do not share his sunny disposition on this matter, and I am not quite ready to get out the bunting. I am of the view that influential bug-eyed lunatics calling for my incarceration for thought crime is proof, if proof were needed, that a more morose disposition is warranted in this case.
Packham is a high priest in a cult. Of the many unkind names that sprang to mind, this was the kindest I could find. Coercive control and intolerance of dissent being key traits of a cult, it seems to me that the persecution of ‘thought crime’ is cultish. Crucially, membership of Packham’s cult has formed around another key cult trait: a catastrophising belief system – the ‘collapsing climate’ – masquerading as science. The reality is that the belief is unproven, and therefore irrational, as I will argue strenuously in due course. I’ll grant you that the total absence of charismatic leaders in this cult puts a slight dent in my argument, but then they’re relying heavily on the Western Left intelligentsia to lead the charge and, let’s face it, charisma has never been its strong suit.
As redoubtable as Mr Corbett is, there is one slight problem with his analysis. The liars don’t stop lying simply because honest and diligent investigators have driven trucks through the gaping holes in their narrative. When a scam is in motion, it continues for as long as there are enough victims to sustain its objective and, as far as I can tell, most people are still entranced by the climate drama. Hang onto that word “drama” because it will acquire special significance in Part V of this piece.
Yes, five parts. Readers of A Plague on Both Houses should know by now that when I set out to deconstruct fables, I try to do it forensically. If you don’t, you run the risk of looking as unconvincing as the fable you’re trying to deconstruct. But, in spite of the subject matter, this will not be a difficult read because it’s essentially the layperson’s guide to becoming a bona fide climate sceptic without having to pretend to be a climate expert.
Where was I? Yes, the inmates are running the asylum, and until they have been snapped out of their trance, they will continue to say things like “the climate continues to collapse”, as if the climate were a 90-year-old man with emphysema trying to keep up with Sebastian Sawe in the London marathon. I suppose if you’re going to come up with something like anthropogenic climate change, you may as well anthropomorphise the climate for good measure. But it’s all a bit bonkers. Cultish, you might say.
One thing I want to make clear at the starting blocks is that expressing doubts over the official carbon narrative is not a denial that capitalism is causing environmental destruction with real impacts on all forms of life, including human life. Indeed, a major part of my beef with this zombie-like focus on CO₂ is that it provides a convenient fig leaf for real environmental destruction to go unchallenged. Well-meaning environmentalists who have uncritically accepted the official carbon-laced narrative are unwittingly providing cover for global capitalism to wreak havoc in so many ways, and to make huge profits off carbon trading derivative scams. I am not pro-industrialisation. I am pro-integrity. Blowhards like Packham are selling a Big Lie, and big lies always come with big costs.
Here is Reuters seizing on Europe’s first properly decent summer in twenty years to drive home the “human-driven, climate change” narrative. And here’s trusty Reuters again telling us that this amazing summer “would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” Do you remember the good old days, circa 2000, when climate sceptics were put in the naughty corner for seizing on prolonged winter cold snaps as a sign not to worry about global warming? That’s not how climate works, they were told. You can’t just point triumphantly to this month’s weather! Climate is not weather! You’ve got to look at the long-term trends. Now we’re told that this summer’s heatwave could not have been caused by anything other than human-made climate change. Oh, the stinking hypocrisy.
And I completely reject accusations of callousness for referring to a heatwave as a “properly decent summer” when old people may have died of heat exhaustion. Old people die of all sorts of things that you’d never expect a person to die from. I’m afraid it goes with being old. Hjalmar Schacht, who was instrumental in setting up the Bank for International Settlements, died in his old age as a consequence of a fall while putting on his dinner trousers. Putting aside the fact that Mr Schacht wasn’t a very nice man, should we issue death threats to comedians exploring the lighter side of dinner trousers, or falling?
Now then. Although I’m sure there are many, many ideological sects valiantly banging the ‘collapsing climate’ drum, I’m going to focus in this piece on the Western Left intelligentsia because I think they are, along with high-profile Inquisitors like Chris Packham, the most ardent and influential proselytisers of climate doom.
After years of silence about the ruling class’s litany of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs), the anti-imperialist Left and the emerging New Left Conspiracy Realists are finally acquiring a penchant for discussing matters conspiratorial. They are catching up with the rest of us in realising that the owls are not what they seem. Yet they still cling like limpets to the one idea that gives them comfort in a new, scary, and conspiratorial world. The ‘collapsing climate’ fable is what keeps them moored to the Olde Worlde. Biblical imagery of floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and droughts is what lulls them to sleep at night.
Here is Clara Mattei cheerfully socking it to The Man on Channel Four. The most disturbing thing about this interview is Krishnan Guru-Murthy asking the effervescent Ms Mattei whether the psychopathy of Capitalism – its desire “to acquire and to exercise power over others” – is simply “a product of natural human nature”. That question, couched in an assumption about the nature of human relationships, encapsulates why we’re in the mess we’re in today. It’s the colonised mind – the internalisation of humiliation expressed as the validation of coercive power. Mattei counters that it doesn’t have to be this way, pointing to some non-Western indigenous cultures which show us a more democratic and humane way of operating. She rightly says that “liberal democracy presupposes economic coercion” and that when people resist that coercion, “liberals and fascists are best friends to implement austerity.” Indeed, as illustrated by Mr Packham of Torquemada, liberal democracy presupposes coercion on all its orthodoxies.
But don’t be fooled by the happy, smiling, anti-coercion rhetoric of Ms Mattei. She is all for energy austerity, which is a most severe form of austerity. She is a ‘collapsing climate’ fanatic, which means she is tacitly on board with coercion because that’s what the entire IPCC-driven climate alarmist narrative is – coerced energy austerity for the entire planet (unless you’re an oligarch running an AI data centre) in the name of saving the planet. The bright and bubbly Matteis of the world are really no different to Madeleine Albright, who, when asked whether killing half a million children in Iraq was worth it, replied that it was. Albright had her cause, and people had to die for it. Mattei also has a cause, and energy austerity promises to drastically shorten lives under the extremist Net Zero policies the West is trying to impose on the planet.
Of course, the Left has a very good track record of killing people on the hard road to Utopia, in the same way that Capitalism has an excellent track record of killing people on the hard road to extraction and exploitation. Two sides of the same coin – coercive power exercised to control humanity. But Mattei won’t examine her fanaticism from that angle. As a relatively wealthy, middle-class professional manager in the West, she won’t have to pay the high price of energy austerity.
Gabriel Rockhill is another interesting character whose schtick is exposing how Western Marxist academic thought was insidiously infiltrated to infect it with the narrative of dead-end identity politics. The switcheroo was constructed to essentially shore up and repeat imperialist talking points. He too is neuro-linguistically programmed to punctuate his lucid thesis with the full-stops and commas of “human-made climate change” (timestamp 59:15).
The irony of Rockhill’s compelling thesis is that, in brilliantly articulating how imperialism’s agents infected the Left with narratives like identity politics to shore up imperialist talking points, he does not appear to have questioned whether ‘human-made climate collapse’ could be another narrative crafted and packaged by the ruling class. To compound the irony of Rockhill’s revelation that identity politics is a Western intelligence psyop, the ‘collapsing climate’ narrative is in fact a non-negotiable badge of Left identity politics – a badge he wears! You don’t have to understand climate science to wear the badge, and you don’t even have to really believe in it, although it probably helps. At base, it’s a first-level password for admission to the club.
I have previously wrestled with the Left on this subject. To no avail of course. When I huffed and puffed at Jonathan Cook, he dismissed my arguments as “boiler-plate scepticism”. However, he failed to knock a single brick out of the wall of the argument that I built to fortify my scepticism. In fact, he began his rebuttal (if you can even call it that) of my rebuttal, by stating that he had no intention of addressing the specifics of my critique of his climate alarmism, which is precisely what you are obliged to do if you are rebutting someone’s argument. To do otherwise is to wave a white flag, which, wittingly or not, is what he did. So this will be my last wrestling match with the Left intelligentsia about their religion of human-caused ‘climate collapse’.
What’s my approach going to be this time? Not much different than the last time, but hopefully more robust and developed. I make no pretensions to understanding the ins and outs of fiendishly complex climate science, which may come as a surprise to readers given that this is a scientific debate. But I will argue that this does not preclude scepticism. The great gift to a sceptic of the official climate science narrative is that, despite the complexity of climate science, you can win your argument for scepticism simply by understanding what science is, and then proving that the propagator of the dominant narrative is not doing anything that remotely resembles science.
Whether you label that “boiler-plate scepticism” or “How to wrestle a climate alarmist to the ground using only words”, it’s quite effective.
The complexity of climate science itself, contrary to being a barrier to entry, is the other chief reason for scepticism because the science is shrouded in a cloud of deep uncertainty, and it’s not difficult to prove that. Uncertainty, for those hard of thinking, precludes an attitude of certainty, which is the overriding attitude of climate alarmist blowhards like Herr Kommandant Packham.
Responsible citizens absolutely do have a duty to weigh up the merits of scientific arguments when they trigger policies that impact our lives, but the question is: how does a non-expert make decisions in complex matters in which there is a high degree of uncertainty among the experts? One clue is that you don’t go around pretending to be certain about things that the experts themselves collectively aren’t certain about.
My message to laypeople propagating climate alarmism is simple: you haven’t got a clue, but don’t worry – nor do I. That’s not the point. The point is that the climate scientists collectively don’t really have a clue either, and it’s not difficult to prove. As I’ve hinted, one dead giveaway is that the body that’s propagating the ‘collapsing climate’ Chicken Little story isn’t doing science. It’s doing politics. And when you mix science with politics, you get politics[2].
Applying labels like “climate denier” to sceptics is a Neanderthal attempt to delegitimise the very thing that gives science its essential and ennobling feature – scientific scepticism – and to drag us back into the Medieval Inquisitions.
I will be quoting from Judith Curry’s book – Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response. She is Professor Emerita of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President of Climate Forecast Applications Network. I have not selected her work because she offers compelling alternative theories for causal mechanisms of climate change. I have selected her work because she has done a far better job than I could of conveying one very simple scientific message that demolishes the dominant narrative. And that message is: We don’t know. As I’ve been stressing, this is more powerful than doing the “my kung-fu is better than your kung-fu” stuff that most sceptics do, and that’s because her approach is more intellectually and scientifically honest. For that reason, it’s also harder to counter.
That’s what I tried to tell Jonathan Cook when I rebutted his climate alarmist nonsense. He really doesn’t know. No one does. We don’t know anywhere near enough to drag the world down the lunatic Net Zero path, and when you don’t know something, it’s puerile and dangerous to pretend that you do. The one thing I do know is that we don’t know, and given the politicisation of science and the horrific complexity of climate science, that’s a far more sane and rational position to take.
So, I have not picked the arguments that claim it’s all solar radiation or that CO₂ couldn’t possibly be the sole cause of the greenhouse effect because it’s a trace gas (0.04%) in the total atmospheric composition… blah, blah, blah. For all I know, perhaps CO₂ really does pack a mighty punch. How would I know? I’m not a climate scientist. The question I will address primarily is: has the IPCC crew responsible for the dominant climate narrative followed the scientific process? Because if they haven’t, the product of their endeavours, such as they are, are not the product of science, and must be taken with a full bag of salt, not the customary pinch.
To the extent that I have highlighted arguments in favour of other causes of global warming, it is purely to demonstrate that there is no scientific consensus around the most intractable questions of climate science. And the absence of a scientific consensus is important, although it is not the only reason for scientific scepticism. Bear in mind that we are talking about a scientific consensus, not a consensus of scientists, which are quite different things, more of which in Part II.
If you take away only one thing from this series of essays, then let it be this:
For every ten, fifty, or one hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers that anyone cares to produce to claim certainty about the dominant CO₂ narrative, I can provide an equal number of peer-reviewed scientific papers that dissent from the dominant narrative. Neither of us can claim to be right because the process of scientific arbitration of the myriad views and hypotheses is very far from the point at which an indisputable scientific consensus can be claimed. The reasons for that are outlined in Parts II and III. Climate science is plagued by deep uncertainty, and serious questions about the quality of the evidence base to support the hypothesis underpinning the official narrative. That’s not an opinion; it’s a fact. To ‘collapsing climate’ blowhards I say: stop pretending that you know what’s going on and start to question the underlying psychological causes of your irrationality. Embrace uncertainty.
In this whole debate, there are really only two things that we can actually be certain of. The first is the corruption of science that has led to propaganda claims painting uncertainty as certainty. The second is uncertainty itself.
So here’s the lay of the land for the next four essays:
In Part II:
- I’m first going to interrogate what science is, and what it definitely isn’t. We shouldn’t really have to start there, and climate alarmists might be offended, but they’ve asked for it. They’re behaving as if they have total certainty about the cause of global warming and, in the circumstances, this is, to put it bluntly, childish. So they deserve the Zippy and George treatment. It’s important to lay down these basic markers, because my arguments hinge on proving that the bodies responsible for propagating the dominant narrative aren’t doing science, and it isn’t scientific to adopt a position of certitude in the face of uncertainty.
- Courtesy of Judith Curry, I’ll make the distinction between a scientific consensus and a consensus of scientists.
- I’ll then interrogate whether a scientific consensus exists on the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused climate change and CO₂ as the primary causal mechanism. Yes, we’ve been here before, but it’s important to the whole argument, so I’m re-litigating more thoroughly. We’ll also do a reasonably thorough probe into the IPCC process of manufacturing consensus to show that the IPCC is not doing science; it’s doing politics, and has been from its inception.
In Part III:
- I’ll paint a picture of the vast ocean of uncertainty surrounding climate science, including a look at the weaknesses in the much-vaunted Global Climate Models.
In Part IV:
- I’ll look at the cost of misdiagnosing an environmental problem. The cost is two-fold. There is the cost of doing senseless things in the pursuit of reducing CO₂, and then there is a massive cost of ignoring real environmental problems as a result of the obsessive focus on CO₂.
- I’ll then answer the question of whether the official narrative is a scam. Is it possible to definitively label it a scam if I’m advocating scepticism and uncertainty of the narrative itself?
In Part V:
- Having argued in Parts II to IV that the ‘collapsing climate’ cult is clearly not scientifically rational, we can put them on the couch, where they belong. When reasonably intelligent people adopt a religious mantra of ‘following the science’ without stopping to reflect on what science actually is, then something else is going on, and that something else is psychological, not intellectual. They may wish to criminalise me for expressing scientific scepticism, but I shall argue that their barbaric impulse to beat me into submission is obviously the behaviour that really needs treatment, preferably involving a straitjacket and a padded cell. Probing the psychology of what’s driving the climate cult is important because it reveals a deeper malaise about the barrage of crises we face, and why the population appears powerless to address the true underlying cause of the so-called ‘polycrisis’.
- I’ll round off by sharing why I’ve never been frightened or truly concerned about the sky or climate falling on our heads, even though I never always knew what a massive scam it was. Being more concerned about the climate, or even the environment more generally, rather than addressing humanity’s relationship with humanity, is cart before horse.
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[1] Image source: By Garry Knight from London, England – People’s Walk for Wildlife 2018 – 04, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76235680
[2] John Barry, author of The Great Influenza.
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