George Rebane
A correspondent alerted me to an important new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled ‘Global Warming – A Case Study in Groupthink’ by Christopher Booker. This extensive report examines the now institutionalized global hysteria embracing the belief that humanity is in the grip of catastrophic yet heroically preventable manmade global warming. In these pages we have commented and debated extensively on the groupthink aspect that has been dominant in politics and academia. Booker’s monograph provides a comprehensive chronicle of its psychological basis which we see playing out daily in the media, and even more fervently among those most innocent in the sciences.
The foreword to the report is by Prof Richard Lindzen, recently retired Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT. It follows in its entirety –
“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 recent 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 profoundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker convincingly 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 major 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 supporting 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.”
The importance of the GWP Foundation’s work receives its strongest testimonial from the constant attack it has been under since its inception by those who have the most to lose in grant funded livelihoods, ejection from groups with pre-calcified credos, reputations based on irredeemable advocacy (i.e. manmade global warming cannot be falsified), and constituencies induced with politically profitable fear.
rebanesruminations.com 
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