A wild goose chase

The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational agency to combat the selfish multinationals and greedy consumerism that threatened to destroy the planet.

Meanwhile science, once a field for open contests between falsifiable hypotheses, was increasingly a creature of government, a wartime development accentuated by the race for technological leadership in the Cold War. Preferment, careers and funding now depended heavily on state favour. Inevitably, academic integrity was compromised.

The collapse of Soviet Communism brought a fresh ally. The Left found in global warming an appealing new anti-capitalist cause, and when EU governments and US Democrats adopted ‘fighting climate change’ as their badge of environmentalist solidarity, an unstoppable coalition of forces had assembled, able to silence dissent and seduce or cow the media on a scale hitherto seen only in ideological or religious regimes. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be crowned the sole authority on climate science.

Nature herself added credibility to alarmism, as temperatures continued to rise. ‘Greenhouse gas’ — the theory that incoming solar heat is partially prevented by atmospheric gases from escaping back into space — entered ordinary discourse.