Am I a Conspiracy Theorist?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

By Tom Forrester-Paton

I ask this because of a recent email exchange with a person of considerable significance to me, who has wondered whether my opposition to climate catastrophism, and the anger I feel at the damage it is doing to our societies, have so obsessed me that I have become slightly detached from reality. It’s a good question.

Just as even paranoiacs can have enemies, so not every conspiracy theory is false. To give one recent example that less disagreeable people than I would prefer to forget: in the early weeks of the Covid epidemic, the idea that it resulted from a leak in a Wuhan lab engaged in gain-of-function research was dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’, with an extra topping of ‘raycism’ thrown in for good measure. Half a decade on, nobody of any consequence seriously doubts the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and Anthony Fauci, who acted as the high priest of Covid hysteria, finds himself in contempt of Congress after pleading the 5th no fewer than 111 times. He’s done so in response to questions aimed at clarifying his role in directing US funds towards gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab – the very lab which, back in 2020, he had vehemently denied could be responsible for creating, and allowing the escape of, the Covid virus. Vehemently denied in public, that is, though thanks to the Washington hearings, his private email correspondence now reveals that he shared with confidantes his fear that a lab leak was indeed the source of the epidemic.

Still, my belief in the existence of a vast conspiracy of silence, encompassing the IPCC, most of the mainstream media, Google and the commanding heights of the political classes of the EU, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to suppress any information, however authoritative its source, that might cast doubt on the need to ‘decarbonise’ their societies is certainly a big one, and it’s fair to question it.

So is my belief that climate alarmism began with a plausible hypothesis, but one which has since been emphatically disconfirmed. Not, however, before it had spawned an entire industry of grant funding, renewables grifting and organisational groupthink. And not before a culture had arisen to protect that industry, within which academics are rewarded with funding and peer approval, while dissidence is punished with ‘cancellation’ and penury.

Which brings me to the first reason to suspect that I may, after all, be quite sane. Because there are literally no social rewards for being a climate sceptic – and plenty of penalties. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people I know who share my scepticism about climate alarmism, let alone my anger at the damage it is doing. The sole reward for my position is the rather solitary one of being able to live with myself. Which is a good thing, because it’s certainly no way to make friends.

People’s reactions vary when they are confronted with my doubt that man-made ‘emissions’ are causing such damage to the planet that it makes good sense to impoverish our people, ruin our economies, hand the People’s Republic of China an industrial sword of Damocles with which to threaten us at a future time of its choosing, and to top it all off, deny the developing nations the finance they need to build the power infrastructure required to bootstrap their economies the way we, their erstwhile colonists, bootstrapped ours – because we have decided that we know better than they do what is best for them.

• The true believers, and those with vested interests – for instance in the bottomless trough of renewables – are visibly angry, and accuse me of ignorance, or of being a habitué of something called Q Anon. (I’ve heard of Q Anon, but never quite fathomed what it is.)
• The inner-city progressives, who haven’t a clue about the science underlying the supposed warming effect of CO2, but have been schooled to believe that adherence to the cult is a mark of civic virtue, tend to respond with that look of pity which the latter-day pharisee reserves for those he considers his moral inferiors.
• Slightly less vexatious are those who pretend to engage with one’s arguments, but invariably fall back on the argument to authority – that is, that the overwhelming majority of the scientists to whose opinions they have been exposed think the alarmist hypothesis is sound. Of course the key words here are “to whose opinions they have been exposed”; few seem ever to have heard of Ian Plimer, Roy Spencer, Roger Pielke, Judith Curry or William Happer, let alone the legion of less prestigious scientists who do not, in the main, reject the hypothesis that man-made contributions to atmospheric CO2 have a warming effect, but insist that this is mild, declines logarithmically with increasing concentration, poses no threat to planetary habitability, and may, in fact, enhance it, just as Svante Arrhenius, the physicist who first hypothesised that increasing CO2 levels, whether or not of anthropogenic origin, could warm the planet and increase its fertility, predicted. And why would they have heard of these scientists, when their most likely sources of news and information are dedicated to ensuring that their voices are never heard?

And it has to be said that the week in which Jason Arday has resigned his professorship at Jesus College, Cambridge is not a good one in which to try to persuade me that the academy is a place of irreproachable intellectual purity, committed to the dispassionate pursuit of truth. Trying to argue with these people is to be constantly reminded of Mark Twain’s aphorism that it is easier to fool a man than to convince him that he has been fooled.

• A tiny minority greet my scepticism with a literal or metaphorical high-five, but precious few of even this meagre cohort are of a mind to join me in declaring the Emperor naked. As I said above, there are many penalties for doing so.

But why, the least unsympathetic of my interlocutors ask, am I so angry about all this? Why, their question implies, do I not just do what most people do – go along with the consensus, settle for a quiet life, and enjoy the social rewards of tribal membership that ensue? I’ll try to answer that question, but it’s a difficult one, since the more I think about why the climate hoax angers me, the angrier I get, and I don’t particularly enjoy being angry.

Most obviously, there are the direct costs of Net Zero. I’m not an economist, so I’m far from able to calculate the amount of money it is proposed to spend on ‘decarbonising’ the world economy. However, Bloomberg suggest that around US$200 trillion will need to be spent to achieve Net Zero by 2050. Since Bloomberg are noted cheerleaders for climate woo-woo in general, and Net Zero in particular, it’s likely that that is a substantial underestimate – but let’s play their silly game and just imagine what that figure, which equates to an annual expenditure (depending on the discount rate you use) of around $2.75 trillion per annum, really means.

$2.75 trillion per annum? What’s that to get angry about? I suppose it is, literally, an unimaginable sum of money – but let’s try and imagine it, by looking at what it could buy if it weren’t being simply evaporated on the altar of climate alarmism.

According to ChatGPT, it costs about US$5 million to design, build and equip a medium-sized hospital in Zimbabwe. Let’s take that as a rough-and-ready guide for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. If that’s so, our $2.75 trillion would buy us 550 such hospitals. This exercise was fun, and to some extent made up for the mounting anger I experienced in performing it, so I continued, and came up with a short table of Stuff We Could Buy if the Greenies Weren’t Wasting All Our Money.

All costs in approximate US$.

I could go on, but you must surely get the picture. I had to check and recheck these numbers to make sure I wasn’t overstating them by a factor of ten. Please do the same, and tell me if I’m wrong. Frankly, even if I was, the numbers would still be staggering. And these are just the direct costs of Net Zero, estimated by an organisation with an avowed belief in climate catastrophism; to paraphrase Groucho Marx, if you don’t like them, much higher estimates are available. And don’t let’s kid ourselves that the major emitters of CO2 like China and India are going to cough up any of it.

But then there are the indirect costs.

Those economies which have most assiduously pursued Net Zero have all seen the cost of their energy soar, and their economies have paid the price. They have experienced growth, in per capita terms, barely distinguishable from zero. Such anaemic GDP growth as they have enjoyed is almost entirely acquitted by their immigration.

But the consequences of energy costs bloated by renewables subsidies, together with the exorbitant costs of taming all that free wind and sun so that it doesn’t crash the grid every ten minutes – oh, and did I mention the cost of paying renewables generators not to feed their electricity into the grid when there’s too much of it? Or the cost of keeping under-utilised (and therefore over-priced) fossil-fuel generation capacity in existence and on standby for the cold, still nights when there isn’t any renewable power at all? If I didn’t, I ought to have, even if it has the disagreeable effect of making me angrier than I already am.

This extraordinary self-harm project has had the effect of steadily eliminating what vestiges of heavy industry remained in Australia and the UK, and indeed wherever it is being seriously attempted, while handing to China the job of producing what we used to produce – something it does by burning coal – while cultivating a Potemkin renewables infrastructure with which to deceive the useful idiots of the West’s green movement into believing they are on board with this stuff. And to keep buying their solar panels and windmills, all of which were supposed to be made in the West as part of the preposterously named green revolution – remember that? But then, as my interlocutor implies, maybe this is all in my deranged head.

Of course, the Net Zero zealots will insist that not spending these scarcely credible sums will result in ‘climate damage’ that exceeds them – but then they would, wouldn’t they? Bjorn Lomborg, who goes significantly further than I do in acknowledging the damaging effects of anthropogenic CO2, and who, just as much to the point, has forgotten more about economics than I’ll ever know, has laid out in exhaustive detail why the money spent on Net Zero could be much better spent on adaptation to whatever climate changes actually eventuate (as opposed to those that exist only in the computer models of the climatariat), with oodles left over for some of those hospitals, schools, submarines, etc. (see above).

Lomborg’s pretty angry about it. Just think how angry he’s going to be when he bones up on a bit of atmospheric science and realises that there really is no ‘climate crisis’, and so the costs of adaptation will be no higher than they have been throughout the history of mankind.

So that’s one source of my anger. But it’s far from the only one.

The history of human betterment is essentially a story of people obtaining usable energy from increasingly dense forms of carbon. With the sole exception of hydro – a renewable of which I thoroughly approve – there are no examples of societies becoming richer, let alone attaining the sort of prosperity we in the West have come to expect, by adopting less energy-dense fuels. None. And as my mother was fond of saying, anyone who thought pre-industrial society had a lot going for it should imagine having toothache in the 17th century.

By the 19th century, Britain, the country where I was born, had become ‘the workshop of the world’ by successfully harnessing the energy density of coal, and was beginning to discover, thanks to the efforts of that much-maligned American titan John D. Rockefeller, the even denser energy to be had from oil. It had also developed institutions that safeguarded property, enforced contracts and rewarded merit. As a consequence, it was wealthier than any country in history. Its people enjoyed an increasing lifespan, and its Navy, nourished by a proto-meritocratic culture and supplied by a chandlery, armaments and victualling infrastructure that anticipated the standardisation and mass-production techniques that would come to define the industrial revolution, enabled it to project power globally. It was therefore all but inevitable that it should become the most successful coloniser in history.

This is not the place to debate the merits of the resulting British Empire, but it is, I think, vain to deny that those of its former colonies that most closely adhered to the model of governance it bequeathed to them have enjoyed the most favourable post-colonial outcomes. Compare New Zealand with Zimbabwe, or Singapore with Sierra Leone, if you want to see what I mean. With that said, though, no society, as I’ve said earlier, has ever attained the sort of prosperity we take – at our peril – for granted, without access to abundant, on-demand energy of the kind that only fossil fuels (with the sole exception of hydro) have been shown to deliver.

Climate alarmists flatter themselves that their neo-Malthusian Gaia-bothering is saving the planet, and by extension the people who inhabit it. They are the sort of people who wring their hands at the plight of sub-Saharan African countries. They can even be heard muttering about various forms of restorative justice, involving handing over huge sums of cash to the supposed victims of British Imperial rule.

Yet these people enthusiastically abet the policy of denying World Bank finance for fossil-fuelled energy projects in those countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – which most need them. “Burning carbon gave us the prosperity you crave,” they say, “but now we have discovered that our wealth was built on two centuries of ecological vandalism, and have decided to repent. And you must repent with us, by seeking your own wealth on the back of this nice, shiny, but entirely theoretical and unproven renewables technology we’ve got for you. Well, when we say ‘we’, we mean some friends of ours. Connections are so important, don’t you know?”

Not only is this a futile ploy, since China, which has no qualms about burning coal, will happily build the power stations the pious West eschews, and will thereby extend yet further its baleful geopolitical influence – it is also insufferably condescending to the Africans concerned.

Cue more anger.

Because it seems to me that if you are going to try to stifle the economic development of a large number of people less fortunate than you, you ought to be damn certain of your reasons for doing so. To persist in such a policy when your hypothesis has been repeatedly disconfirmed, and with utter disregard for the wishes of the people upon whom you are imposing it, is staggeringly unethical – and that angers me. Greatly. I suppose that’s a conspiracy theory, in strict terms, but it’s not as though these bastards are shy about it – heck, they brag about it!

So where are we up to? We’ve covered the deindustrialisation of our spavined economies. We’ve covered the stifling of developing economies by artificially depriving them of the finance they need to, er, develop. We’ve covered the eye-watering rivers of cash being doled out in pursuit of these ridiculous goals. What’s left? I know – the complete absence of any democratic mandate. I mean, if all this were really such a good idea, you’d think its advocates would have the confidence to plead its case in Parliament. But no. Both in Australia, the UK and a dozen other countries, the climatariat so captured the governing elites that swathes of sociopathic legislation passed into law without effective parliamentary scrutiny.

Whatever you think about the case for decarbonisation, you surely must have misgivings about committing such vast sums of taxpayers’ money without the semblance of a debate. A good example of this occurred in the UK, when Theresa May, desperate to leave something on the statute books that would constitute a ‘legacy’, and draw some of the attention away from her otherwise catastrophic premiership, signed Britain up to ‘Net Zero by 2050’ using secondary legislation – that is, law-making by means not of a parliamentary vote, but by the exercise of powers conferred upon her by earlier legislation.

That pretty much wraps up my catalogue of conspiracy theories or, as I prefer to think of them, reasons for being incandescently angry at the whole shoddy business of climate alarmism. There is, however, just one more point I’d like to make, and it concerns the trashing of science.

Way back in 2009, when the world learned – but tried to pretend that it hadn’t – that a group of ‘scientists’ were conspiring to evade attempts to replicate their work by a number of means, including rigging peer review to exclude from major journals any papers which cast doubt on the alarmist narrative, Professor Michael Kelly, who served on the Oxburgh Committee investigating what became known as Climategate, wrote the following:

(i) I take real exception to having simulation runs described as experiments (without at least the qualification of ‘computer’ experiments). It does a disservice to centuries of real experimentation and allows simulations output to be considered as real data. This last is a very serious matter, as it can lead to the idea that real ‘real data’ might be wrong simply because it disagrees with the models! That is turning centuries of science on its head.

He went on to write:

My overall sympathy is with Ernest Rutherford: “If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.“

Despite this trenchant criticism, the Committee felt able to exonerate the UEA scientists of any ‘intentional’ scientific misconduct – the word ‘intentional’ doing some pretty heavy lifting, it seems to me.

In truth, the scientific principles with which I was schooled have been comprehensively flouted, and the scientific academy has suffered as a result. It’s perhaps worth rehearsing just one or two of those principles.

Data beats theory, every time. To quote the great Richard Feynman: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” The so-called ‘climate scientists’ – remember when we had a discipline called climatology, practised by climatologists? – didn’t get the memo.

The Climategate scandal revolved around a piece of scientific deceit used by Michael Mann (whose evidence in a recent defamation case against Mark Steyn was described by the judge as constituting “bad-faith trial misconduct” and “an affront to the Court’s authority”.) to conceal the fact that the dendrological evidence, upon which he was relying to construct his famous ‘hockey-stick’ graph of temperature trajectory, having corresponded with the instrumental record quite well since instrumental records began back in the days of Newton, started to go rogue just when Mann wanted it to agree with the upward tick in temperatures that began after the Little Ice Age ended – the ‘blade’ of his ‘hockey stick’.

In defiance of Feynman, Mann simply truncated the dendrological record at the point where it parted company with observations, and spliced onto it the instrumental record for the missing years, before submitting it for publication in Nature. This was known among Mann’s cronies, prominent among them those working at the UEA, whose server contained the emails that revealed the misconduct, as ‘Mike’s Nature Trick’. The resulting graph, paired with the IPCC’s now-discredited (i.e., the IPCC has now declared it to be “implausible”) RCP8.5 model, became parents to countless pieces of climate-bothering, sociopathic legislation.

Speaking of the IPCC, here’s another of my wild-eyed conspiracy theories: it was set up to wrangle a problem that was presupposed to exist. The idea that it might at any stage in its lamentable existence have concluded that anthropogenic CO2 emissions were not really a problem, so it could wind itself up and allow its contributors to do something useful with their lives, is simply preposterous. Turkey, Christmas, etc. It is, I suppose, important to observe that the IPCC generates two reports:

1. the Assessment Report (AR), containing the results of the lucubration of the IPCC’s academic participants. Nobody reads the AR, apart from dastardly deniers looking for errors or, more commonly, findings which are at odds with what is to be found in
2. the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). Supposed to be a simplified, but truthful distillation of the AR, comprehensible to the lay reader, and so, allegedly, suitable for informing policy-makers.

The problem with this structure is that it allows the compilers of the SPM to misrepresent aspects of the AR which they find insufficiently alarming, and to be reasonably confident that their enhancements will pass unnoticed. Conversely, it provides cover for the AR academics. If challenged by dastardly climate deniers to explain the failure of some aspect of a past SPM to agree with observations, they can point to the relevant section of the corresponding AR and say “look, we may have mentioned outcome x in our report, but we did so with ‘low confidence’ – shame that detail didn’t make it into the SPM, but the SPM’s not our responsibility, so…”

Well, I think the AR contributors are responsible for the way their work is represented in the SPMs. They were aware, year after year, that their ‘low-confidence’ (I prefer ‘garbage in, garbage out’) model RCP8.5 was being brandished as the Business as Usual (BAU) case by the activist journalists of the legacy media to persuade legislators to take ever more expensive ‘action on climate’. Even if professional etiquette did not compel it, it was a matter of simple civic duty to point out that RCP8.5 was shot through with gross exaggerations, and quite unsuitable for policy-making purposes. But that would have imperilled the increasingly lucrative climate cult, of which the IPCC was the Vatican. So instead, and despite numerous complaints (that’d be those dastardly deniers with their ridiculous conspiracy theories, again), they did nothing to correct the record.

Michael Mann’s peccadillos, and those of the British and New Zealand cronies whom he suborned, were waved aside by the closing of the ranks which has characterised climate ‘science’ ever since. Academics, having no more courage than any of us, and rightly sensing that there was little to gain but much to be lost by speaking out, have tended, if they have not joined the chorus of doom, to stay silent. One of the consequences of this browbeating of dissidents has been to create the misleading impression of an ‘overwhelming consensus’ of scientific opinion backing the alarmist narrative.

And even if such a consensus did exist, so what? Science advances by challenging consensus, not by bending to it. From Galileo, insisting that the earth was in orbit around the sun and not the other way round, to Barry Marshall, infecting himself with helicobacter pylori to test his hypothesis that it, and not stress, was the cause of peptic ulcer, the history of science is all but the history of cranks proving themselves right – overturning the prevailing consensus.

A few academic scientists, some of whom I have named above, have taken advantage of their tenured status to express their disapproval of the shenanigans necessary to keep the increasingly lucrative bandwagon on the road, but the absurdly counter-scientific notion that the science was ‘settled’ had so captured the mainstream media that organs such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and the Guardian, if they admit the existence of these heretics, do so only to disparage them as ‘deniers’.

But then I suppose that could just be another of my conspiracy theories.

This article was originally published on the author’s blog Harrumpf.com.