How ideology colonises "science"

Scientists are not supermen and scientific institutions are as political as any other organisation.

In recent posts here, I have been trying to explain my lack of satisfaction with the Conservative’s climate policy U-turn. Using some older work and new articles, I’ve been hoping to persuade readers here that we should be demanding something much more radical from politicians of all parties. I am of course glad that the cross-party Westminster consensus is apparently collapsing. But we should not be either complacent or naïve. UK politics has been hollowed out, and the ground from which we would like to recover has been sterilised by decades of policies that could have been designed by our enemies, and likely were, depending on how we conceive of them. Our opportunities for recovery have been undermined, that is to say, and that includes the state of broader political culture as much as industry and the economy. Meanwhile, the undue influence of the blob continues to haunt our sclerotic political institutions. Ed Miliband is, after all, still Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, and Labour are still the government, with a massive parliamentary majority, even if polls this week put them in third/fourth place, tied with the Greens. They are a trapped rat. And trapped rats can be dangerous creatures, for they have nothing left to lose.

Anyway, I have a recent piece up over at the Daily Skeptic, which I will post below for paid subscribers to this Substack. The piece is about some articles that have been published by organs in the green blob fold, protecting the reputation of fake climate scientists, Friederike Otto, who now serves at the temple of all dodgy modelling, Imperial College London. Otto’s pseudoscience is the climate industry known as “attribution”, which claims to be able to explain how many times more likely a weather event was made by anthropogenic global warming. It was developed to assist the political agenda, and many comments, made by Otto et al themselves expose the fact of this fake science’s motivations. Journalists have rushed to her defence because that institution, too, has fallen into the climate abyss, to become an empty shell of what it was. Fake journalism defends fake science.

I have an older video on “attribution”. I called it “ecohyperreality”. Rather than taking on Otto’s work, I started with the Met Office’s Richard Betts, who is a scientist that I once thought would know better than to defend very obvious pseudoscience.

There is a lot of hyperreality around at the moment. I don’t tend to indulge the French Marxian postmodernists much. But he really was onto something.

If you don’t like the continental po-mos, there’s always good old GK Chesterton who before both world wars, and before mass media as we or even Baudrillard would recognise it, wrote in Heretics that “We have passed the age of ideals and are now in an age of idols” and five years later in What’s Wrong with the World that “The world is full of modern versions of old mistakes, dressed up in new clothes.” From Gaia to Greta, icons and avatars stand in the way of contact with reality. Baudrillard’s outlook was bleaker. Chesterton’s popular wisdom more hopefully punctured the intellectual’s claims to greater purchase on reality; a grounding in reality was achieved through home, community, faith, and daily labour, whereas society’s experts increasingly dwelled in rabbit holes of abstracts and ideologies. Perhaps not as much has changed as we thought.

I don’t mean to bang on about Chesterton. And I would only go so far in agreeing with him about What’s Wrong With the World (since that was 115 years ago). But he raises interesting objections to aspects of modernity. After considering the claims by experts’ of the day that lower-born children should have their heads shaved to prevent the spread of lice, Chesterton concluded his book with this immense passage:

I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

It’s an extremely human exposition of the problem in general, not merely public health policy the parallels of which need not be spelled out in detail. What would he have made of covid and lockdowns that denied children their formative experiences? What would he have made of climate change and climate policy? What would have made of attribution and the Conservative’s climate policy U-turn? Well, he did say:

The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

And that is an impasse, because mistakes have gone too far. The point being made by GK is that the notion that individuals should be modified to suit the needs of the political order is an abomination. Today’s ideologies are arguably even more idols or artefacts of simulations than they were in 1910, or in 1981. They all, however, seem to require modification of society and individuals — literally, physically in the case of gender ideology. The climate agenda requires “behaviour modification” and weirdo research units at questionable universities promise to serve the agenda with ideas about how to engineer “values” to elicit such obedience.

I don’t believe much about such claims. I think if government’s nudges “work”, it is through brute force, not sophisticated mind control, developed by psychologists. I have encountered these “academics”. They’re idiots — simulacra of researchers in simulacra of research organisations. But the objectionable principle — the “ethics” — of their intent stands nonetheless and signifies a political order: they think themselves so much our betters that it is their job to modify what we think, not through persuasion, but through brute force. And the justification of that grotesque imposition is, yet again, a simulation — “attribution”. I have often wondered if contemporary academia is anything but organised self-justification.

I want those mistakes to be corrected. I’d rather not have it that “the social fabric shall sway and split and fall”. I don’t think it needs to. And I don’t think we need anything as radical as “landlords and laws and sciences must go down”. But if the pseudoscience will not go down, then the landlords and laws that are predicated on the pseudoscience will go down, and so will the antisocial fabric.

But attribution is not going away. The IPCC, which seems set to bring the pseudoscience into its arsenal on the belief that diluting scientific standards will better equip it to fight a political war. The UN and the UNFCCC process are not going to roll back ambitions for global climate politics, much less attempt to take stock of political or economic reality of the kind experience by 8 billion or so people. It may face obstacles, but it will wrap itself around them, to further the aims of global intergovernmental environmental bureaucracy, even if that means modifying it claims, just as surely as the agenda began on neomalthusian grounds that were debunked by history.

This week, more flesh, if that is what you could call it, was put on the bones, if that is what they are, of the Conservative’s climate policy U-turn. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Claire Coutinho compared Net Zero to a religion, and the discussion unfolded:

Nick Robinson: You mean it’s like a religion in the sense that if you question Net Zero, you’re treated like a flat-earther or…

Both: a heretic.

Claire Coutinho: Exactly you’re a heretic. You have to be excommunicated. And the problem with that is as soon as you get that level of groupthink, then people start making bad choices. And some of the choices that we’re making at the moment, like I said, it’s going to make things incredibly expensive and difficult for people in the country.

Nick Robinson: There’ll be people I think listening to you now, saying ‘well it should be a religion, for goodness sake it’s more important than anything else in our lives.’ You became a mother this year, you’ve got a little baby not yet one. And there’ll be plenty of people saying, if the planet is going to burn, if there’s going to be no future for our children or our grandchildren, yeah, damn right it should be a religion. It should be much more important than pounds shillings and pence on some spreadsheet.

Claire Coutinho: Well, two things. Firstly, at the moment, Net Zero is making climate change worse. Every time a business leaves here for a country that’s powered by coal — we don’t have coal in the system, by the way — every time a business does that, you’re making emissions worse. What Ed Miliband is doing at the moment is shutting down the North Sea. So instead of using North Sear gas, you’re importing gas with four times the emissions. That’s making climate change worse. And the problem when I say Net Zero is a religion, it’s that people are so invested in saying that this thing is working, this project is working, you’ve got to keep going, you can’t ask any questions, that we are heading down the wrong path.

But Net Zero is not a religion. It’s is the ritual. Climate change is the religion. Or more precisely, environmentalism (i.e. green ideology) is the religion.

The harm done to industries and homes is not a bug of Net Zero, it’s a feature of environmentalism. I will remind readers of this, as discussed in a recent post, from one of the green movement’s prophets:

Coutinho’s claim is still rooted in the problem. Net Zero is bad for the climate, she says. Her argument is to replace the Climate Change Act, not to just have done with it.

Some might say that Coutinho is pulling her punches, because she doesn’t know how they will land. If her criticism of climatism goes any deeper than criticism of Net Zero policy, then she will be seen as a climate change denier. And then Otto’s fake science will make Coutinho morally culpable for the millions and billions of catastrophes that happen in Otto’s simulations, but not in real life.

In real life, as these pages have explained, people are made far, far, far less vulnerable to weather of all kinds, whether or not anthropogenic global warming has had any influence on them at all. In the decades before Chesterton’s discussion about the little girl with red hair, infant mortality on the continent was as high as nearly 50%. In Britain, it was around a third. The degrowth and deindustrialisation features (not bugs) of the climate agenda will turn the clock back.

Decoding green ideology means comparing Chesterton’s little girl with red hair and Ehrlich’s idiot child with a machine gun as players in two stories. We’re all idiot children with machine guns, in Ehrlich’s view, because if we were allowed cheap and abundant energy, we would destroy everything. On Chesterton’s view, only such experts lack sufficient capacity to protect what is loved.

On the green view, deindustrialisation and degrowth and infant mortality are acceptable consequences of finding an optimum balance between society and the natural world. That is the religious precept substantiated by the 2008 Climate Change Act and latterly by Net Zero. David Miliband said it himself: “we need the choices that individuals make about electricity, about heat and about transport, also to respect environmental limits and to ensure that we live within our means, environmentally”.

That limit, which is decided by the panel of experts, be they the Climate Change Committee, or Otto and her computer games, is about more than lopping off a little girl’s red hair for the sake of dubious social welfare metrics, as Chesterton would have it; it lops the entire child and her future. And it keeps the urchin in the gutter.

Climate policy is worse than climate change. Even climate policy that succeeds climate policy because earlier climate policy was bad for the climate will be worse than climate change. And that is because the feature — not the bug — of green ideology will persist: the myth, icon, avatar, or simulation, call it what you will, of an ideal, “optimal” balance will in turn generate the myth of a “climate crisis”. And any departure from an urgent course towards that radical social reorganisation will be framed by the armies of eco-wonks and fake academics, fake news journalists, and fake civil society organisations, as a course plotted for climate crisis, past way points, which, like every single one of Ehrlich’s dire predictions since the 1960s, will not come to pass.

And that should be the clue and the cue for the next government. The next government needs to have the moral and intellectual courage to say: “there is no climate crisis, and every prediction made by the green movement’s pet scientists has failed.” And that is why I remain unimpressed with the Conservatives.

Here’s my Daily Skeptic piece from earlier this week…

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Climate ‘Science’ is Now Pure Politics

In recent years, news coverage of every extreme weather event throughout the world has included a statement of anthropogenic climate change’s alleged influence on the probability of that event occurring. These estimates that this or that flood or wildfire was made so many more times more likely by climate change invariably come from an outfit called World Weather Attribution (WWA), led by Dr Friederike Otto of Imperial College. As we have reported here before, Otto’s method, known as simply ‘attribution’, is controversial and arguably unscientific, and only of any use in generating climate fake news stories. But her work has immense political utility, and almost certainly for that reason she was this year appointed to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to lead its “detection and attribution” chapter, which, being based until now in more robust observational science and statistics, has been unable to provide the scientific certainty required to sustain the alarmist climate narrative. The inevitable criticism of that obvious political appointment has in turn yielded a response from the Green Blob: an attempt to rehabilitate the climate pseudoscience, to defend the agenda and smear the critics.