“All leading scientific bodies are in agreement”

A second mantra that is often recited by the alarmists is to the effect that all leading scientific bodies worldwide are in agreement that urgent action is necessary to prevent catastrophe.

Certainly, political pressure-groups like the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society (one of Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded lobby-groups) have screamed almost as loudly as the alarmist politicians and media. A joint statement by 11 national scientific bodies, including these two, says we need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions immediately, and spend a great deal more money on scientists, or catastrophe will follow.

However, in such statements as this, there is a curious scarcity of references to specific articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. These scientific pressure-groups are unable to point to a scientific consensus on their extremist proposition in the learned journals; for the number of peer-reviewed articles predicting doom is vanishingly small, and nearly all of them are written by the members of a tiny, politically-connected clique.

Of these national scientific pressure-groups, the U.S. National Research Council (an advisory and public policy arm of the National Academy of Sciences) is perhaps the most militantly ridiculous. It is recorded (Newsweek, April 28, 1975) as having produced a report 30 years ago alerting the nation to the imagined consequences of global cooling. That entertaining report said –

“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale, because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

The National Academy of Sciences has changed its opinion with the weather. Between 1940 and 1975, global temperature had fallen, notwithstanding a continuous and monotonic increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and notwithstanding an increase in solar activity, suggesting a larger role for the oceans than the UN at present admits.

In response to the supposed threat of “global cooling”, the National Academy of Sciences trotted out its report, which, though cautiously expressed as was then the custom, was certainly exciting enough to attract the widespread media attention that such politicized bodies now crave. And we were told, then as now, by media outlets such as the BBC, that global cooling represented the scientific “consensus”.

Since 1975, global temperature has risen. The NAS has joined other politicized science bodies round the world to produce another report, this time expressed in alarmist terms and going exotically beyond the “consensus” as defined by Oreskes (2004).

Politicized individuals, as well as groups, have made the transition from cryo-alarmism to thermo-alarmism with seamless disregard for intellectual self-consistency.

One such is the amiable, eccentric British eco-diplomatist, Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes Tickell, who energetically argued for State expansion, intervention, and taxation to address the “problem” of “global cooling” 35 years ago, and today unblushingly argues, no less enthusiastically, for State expansion, intervention, and taxation to address the “problem” of “global warming”.

These easy transitions of allegiance to pseudo-scientific hypotheses mask a consistency of allegiance to an explicitly dirigiste, anti-free-market, anti-business ideology. Often, when the word “consensus” is prayed in aid by bureaucrats, politicians and scientists talking about “global warming”, they do not mean a consensus about the science, but a undeclared “consensus” on the international Left about the political measures which they wish to frighten the world into adopting, regardless of the direction in which the science actually points, and regardless of whether there is a scientific consensus at all.