Modern political movements have not infrequently laid claim to being based in science, from immigration restriction and eugenics (in the U.S. after WWI), to antisemitism and race ideology (in Hitler’s Germany), to Communism and Lysenkoism (under Stalin). Each of these falsely invoked a scientific consensus that convinced highly educated citizens, who were nonetheless ignorant of science, to set aside the anxieties associated with their ignorance. Since all scientists supposedly agreed, there was no need for them to understand the science. 

Of course, this version of “the science” is the opposite of science itself. Science is a mode of inquiry rather than a source of authority. However, the success that science achieves has earned it a measure of authority in the public’s mind. This is what politicians frequently envy and exploit.
 
The climate panic fits into this same pattern and, as in all the preceding cases, science is in fact irrelevant. At best, it is a distraction which has led many of us to focus on the numerous misrepresentations of science entailed in what was purely a political movement.
 
In the United States, the obsession with decarbonization (i.e., Net Zero) originates in the reaction to the amazing post-WWII period, when ordinary workers were able for the first time to own a house and a car. I was a student in the ’50s and early ’60s. It was commonplace to mock the poor taste and materialism of these so-called ordinary people. With the Vietnam War, things got amplified as the working class got drafted while students sought draft deferments.
 
Students, during this period, were still a relative elite; the massive expansion of higher education was only beginning. Many students justified their behavior by insisting that the Vietnam War was illegitimate, while ignoring the obvious fact that Vietnamese people were fleeing south rather than north. It was fashionable to regard the U.S. as evil and deserving of overthrow. Opposition often turned to violence, as in the case of groups like the Weather Underground and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). 
 
In 1968, I was teaching at the University of Chicago. My wife and I were spending the summer in Colorado, and we had a student taking care of our home. When we returned, we found a police car monitoring our apartment. The house-sitter had apparently turned it into a crash pad for the SDS during the Democrat Party Convention. Our apartment was littered with their literature, which included instructions for poisoning Chicago’s water supply. This period seemed to end with Nixon’s election, but we now know that this was just the beginning of the long march through the institutions—a march being conducted by avowed revolutionaries intent on destroying Western society. For the new revolutionaries, however, the enemy was not the capitalists: it was the working middle class. Capitalists, they realized, could easily be bought off.
 
Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education, then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences, and now STEM. What is usually ignored is that professional societies were also obvious targets. Such societies are generally led by an executive director who can, sometimes indirectly, speak for thousands of members who are busy with their professional activities. Capturing a single figure is likely easier than capturing department faculties. My wife attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association in the late ’60s, and it was already fully “woke.” Foundations, flush with cash, were also obvious targets. The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation are notable examples.

The Long March Through the Industries

While there is currently a focus on the capture of education, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) was not the only goal of the march through the institutions. I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus of revolutionary movements on the means of production. The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement. Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, endangered species, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970, the primary focus turned to the energy sector—which, after all, is fundamental to all production and, relatedly, involves trillions of dollars. As we will see, this last item was fundamental. 
 
This new focus was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations like the EPA and the Department of Transportation. Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies like the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. The capture of the Royal Society in the UK was an obvious European example. 
 
There was a bit of floundering to begin with. The movement initially attempted to focus on global cooling due to the reflection of sunlight by sulfate aerosols emitted by coal-fired generators. After all, there seemed to have been global cooling between the 1930s and the 1970s. However, the cooling ended in the 1970s. There was an additional effort to tie the sulfates to acid rain, which was allegedly killing forests. It wasn’t long, however, before the affected forests had recovered. In the ’70s, attention turned to CO₂ and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. 
 
The attraction of CO₂ to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon-based fuels. It was also the product of breathing. However, there was a problem: CO₂ was a minor greenhouse gas compared to naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO₂ would only lead to warming of less than 1^oC. Then, in the early ’70s, a paper by Syukuro Manabe and Richard Wetherald came to the rescue. 
 
Using a highly unrealistic one-dimensional model of the atmosphere, Manabe and Wetherald assumed (without any basis) that relative humidity would remain constant as the atmosphere warmed. They found that the resulting positive feedback would amplify the impact of CO₂ by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier’s Principle, which held that natural systems tended to oppose change. But, to be fair, the principle had not been rigorously proven.
 
Positive feedbacks now became the stock-in-trade of all climate models, which suddenly began producing responses to doubling CO₂ of 3^oC and even 4^oC rather than a paltry 1^oC or less. The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade (or two, or three) without the faintest idea of how to achieve this without destroying their society (and, in the case of off-shore wind, killing marine mammals).
 
Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well-being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive. The warming projected was within the range that everyone successfully negotiates every day. By contrast, most educated elites learned how to rationalize anything to please their professors—a skill that leaves them particularly vulnerable to propaganda. But few ordinary people contemplate retiring to the arctic rather than Florida. 
 
Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing small changes in their temperature metric (which, itself, is a false measure of climate), they now point to weather extremes which occur almost daily some place on earth, as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO₂ (and now also to even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide). Such extremes show no significant correlation with the emissions. From the political point of view, however, extremes provide convenient visuals that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes.

Birth of a Consensus 

The desperation of political figures often drives them so far as to claim that climate change is an existential threat (associated with alleged “tipping points”). This despite a complete absence of theoretical or observational support, and despite the fact that official documents produced to support climate concerns (for example, the Working Group 1 reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC) never come close to substantiating these worst-case projections. 
 
There was one exception to the obsession with warming, and that was the ozone depletion issue. However, even this issue served a purpose. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention which banned Freon, passed through MIT on his way back from Montreal, he gloated over his success. But he assured us that we hadn’t seen anything yet: we should wait to see what they would do with CO₂. In brief, the ozone issue constituted a dry run for global warming. To be sure, the EPA’s activities still include conventional pollution control, but energy dominates.
 
Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars. These recipients must share just a few percentage points of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles and guarantee the support of these politicians for the policies associated with the reorientation.
 
That the claim of consensus was always propagandistic should be obvious. But the history of the claim itself is interesting in its own right. Global warming was first introduced as a concept to the American public in a 1988 Senate hearing, at which James Hansen from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York testified. This, itself, was somewhat surprising. Hansen was primarily a space scientist. He was not considered a specialist in climate. How he came to be the voice of climate alarm is worth recounting.

In the 1960’s, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland created a satellite center in New York, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) that was headed by Dr. Robert Jastrow. When Jastrow left GISS in the 1970’s, Greenbelt attempted to close GISS, and, indeed, most of the people at GISS returned to Greenbelt. However, a small group, led by James Hansen, decided to remain in New York. NASA cut their funding. But EPA came to their rescue with the proviso that the research at GISS turn to climate. Apparently, Hansen’s friend, Michael Oppenheimer, then the Barbara Streisand Scientist at Environmental Defense (subsequently a professor of climate policy at Princeton), was on the EPA review panel that recommended this.
 
In covering Hansen’s testimony, Newsweek Magazine printed a cover showing the Earth on fire with the subtitle “All scientists agree.” This was at a time when there were only a handful of institutions dealing with climate, and even these institutions were more concerned with understanding the present climate rather than the impact of CO₂ on climate (in fact, many very prominent scientists opposed the claim that increasing CO₂ was a significant danger to climate due to man’s industrial emissions. A select group of these are listed in the linked appendix). Nonetheless, a few politicians (most notably Al Gore) were already making this their signature issue. And, when the Clinton-Gore administration won election in 1992, there began a rapid increase by a factor of about 15 in funding related to climate. This, indeed, created a major increase in individuals claiming to work on climate, who understood that the support demanded agreement about the alleged danger of CO₂.

So it was that whenever there was an announcement of a discovery that needed to be made (e.g., that the medieval warm period never happened, or that some historical change or other could be attributed to CO₂), there were inevitably so-called scientists who would claim to have found what was asked for and who then received remarkable rewards and recognition despite making highly questionable arguments.
 
This did produce a consensus of sorts. It was not a consensus that we were facing an existential threat, but rather that the projected increase in GDP by the end of the 21^st century would be decreased from about 200% to 197%. Even this prediction is an exaggeration—especially since it ignores the undeniable benefits of CO₂.
 
So here we are, confronted with policies that destroy western economies, impoverish the working middle class, condemn billions of the world’s poorest to continued poverty and increased starvation, leave our children despairing over the alleged absence of a future, and will enrich the enemies of the West who are enjoying the spectacle of our suicide march, a march that the energy sector cowardly accepts, being too lazy to exert the modest effort needed to check what is being claimed. As Voltaire once noted, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” Hopefully, we will awaken from this nightmare before it is too late.

This piece originally appeared at AmericanMind.com and has been republished here with permission.