21.
ECO-FASCISTS AND PSEUDO-SCIENTISTS

On November 29 2012 Rebecca Rubin gave herself up to FBI agents in Blaine, Washington, having been wanted for eco-terrorism for seven years. Her organization had previously arranged at least 20 arson attacks or attempted arson, including firebombing of administrative offices, a ski resort, a barn and a timber company.⁴⁵⁰

Eco-terrorists commit a lot of violence, but they usually confine it to vandalism, for example by throwing paint on fur-clad people or destroying scientific research laboratories. A survey of 1,000 biomedical researchers showed that approximately a quarter had been affected by violence from activists, and before the 9/11 terror attack in the US, the FBI listed the environmental movement Earth Liberation Front as the country’s leading terror group after it had conducted some 600 attacks between 1996 and 2004.⁴⁵¹

However, it is clear that many of these people fantasize about greater destruction. For instance, editor John Davis of the World Wildlife Fund has, for one stated that: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs”, and that he “suspects that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”

“I think if we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically”, stated Judy Barr from the Earth First! movement correspondingly, and elaborated: “I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism.” However, it was really much more than capitalism, some of these people were after. It was humanity. In its early days, Earth First! used the slogan “Back to the Pleistocene” (which ended about 2.6 million years ago, when there were not even ape-men). In their newsletter of December 1989, they wrote that “if radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human populations back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” David Foreman, who was their spokesman, said to Backpacker Magazine in September 1988 that “man is no more important than any other species. It may well take our extinction to set things straight.“ On another occasion he said that “phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth, social and environmental.”

Charles Wurster was co-founder and senior scientist for The Environmental Defence Fund, and he evidently didn’t like DDT, as he was the man we met earlier who put alcohol into sea water to suggest that DDT could stop photosynthesis. He was once asked whether a ban on DDT would lead to people switching to other toxins that were more dangerous to humans, to which he replied “probably”. When the reporter asked if this would not kill people, he replied: “So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and (malaria) is as good a way as any.”⁴⁵²

Michael Oppenheimer of the same organization elaborated: “If China, where there’s one car for every 500 people, gets the same kind of cars and the same ratio of cars to people that the United States does, where there’s one car for every two people, the world is essentially going to go through the roof environmentally. We can’t let that happen.”⁴⁵³

So keep them poor. It should be said here that Oppenheimer later left the organization because he believed it was infiltrated by Marxists and anarchists, which sounds about right.

Getting rid of the poor hasn’t been the only objective of radical environmentalists; democracy could also seem a hindrance, as James Lovelock, author of The Gaia Hypothesis, stated in an interview:

“Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”⁴⁵⁴

Actually, neither the US nor UK resorted to dictatorship, even as when they fought the dictators in World War II, but no matter. The Finnish Literature Prize winner and winner of The Environmental Prize by Finnish Association for Nature Conservation and founder of The Finnish Natural Heritage Foundation, Pentti Linkola, has for years argued that democracy is a “death religion” and that:

“Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”⁴⁵⁵

According to him, a “transnational organization like the UN” should attack the cities with nuclear bombs or biological or chemical weapons. Linkola has also argued that the Stalinist and Nazi extermination campaigns were “massive thinning operations,” which have “not overturned our ethical norms.”⁴⁵⁶ Speaking of thin, he also didn’t like people weighing too much: “That there are billions of people over 60 kg weight on this planet is recklessness,” he said. In 1994, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal, in which he stated:

“If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating, if it meant millions of people would die.”⁴⁵⁷

Kill, kill, kill!

Of course, most environmentalists are not fascists, and the environmental movement includes some of worlds’ greatest friends, which we should never forget. But it also includes some of its worst enemies, which we should never ignore.

In 2009, the American writer and author Alex Steffen introduced a way to distinguish between environmentalists. His first, and by far the largest, group is “light green”, which are those who try to exercise personal environmental awareness - for example by driving fuel-efficient cars, better insulating their houses or support tree planting. That can’t be wrong.

The second type of environmentalist, according to Alex Steffen, is “bright green”. These believe that environmental problems must be solved with modern technology, such as genetic manipulation and new forms of nuclear power. Among the most prominent individuals who hold such believes are Stuart Brand, founder of the publication series Whole Earth Catalogue and think tank organisation The Long Now Foundation. This group also includes ecologist Patrick Moore, physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Nobel laureate James Watson (who helped discover the structure of DNA), democratic politicians George McGovern and Jimmy Carter plus financier Warren Buffet and many more. Many of those people have launched or supported creative environmental solutions that have brought the world forward.

However, there is also a third environmental movement: “dark green”, represented by the likes of Paul Ehrlich, Charles Wurster and Pentti Linkola, who portray technological progress and economic growth as core problems and therefore want them stopped.

Many dark green ecologists favour very authoritarian and perhaps global government. They are typically against globalization and international trade, and their arguments often contain attacks on multinational firms, market economies and the profit motive. The main organizations with dark environmentalism leanings are probably Die Grühne, Friends of the Earth, Earth Liberation Front, Greenpeace, Environmental Defence Fund, Earth First!, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientist and the World Wildlife Fund.

Ideology can have complex roots, but at some point, it needs some simplicity. Arguably, the roots of dark environmentalism go back to the aforementioned German counter-enlightenment movement Sturm und Drang from the late 18th century, which was opposed to enlightenment, rationality, science, aesthetics and universalism. This reappeared as the German Luddite and anti-enlightenment Romantic Movement. This romanticism spread from Germany across Europe, where Frenchman Rousseau became one of its better-known advocates, but it always had the strongest grip among Germans. Its main theses were that technology and, in part, civilization were artificial phenomena and thus dubious and that the past was better than the present. They also believed there was an important bond between a given people, its traditional culture and the area from which they originated, which is why the Romantics were typically strong nationalists and against international trade or mixing of races.

Simplicity entered the picture when, in 1866, the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who was enthusiastic member of the Romantic Movement, introduced the concept of “ecology”. To view all of nature as a whole was rather new, and Haeckel argued that this view should replace religion.⁴⁵⁸

On the heels of this came the German Blut und Boden (blood and soil) movement. This emphasized the spiritual and genetic purity (blood) and a dream of returning to nature (soil). The movement supported organic farming, conservation of nature, natural medicine, self-sufficiency and traditional German heritage. In 1913, the philosopher Ludwig Klages published the book Mensch und Erde (Man and Land), where he elaborated on the philosophy and deemed new technology and advanced farming technology to be destructive to the land. After this book, the Blut und Boden movement would increasingly condemn capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, new technologies, as well as Jews and Christianity. Cities were seen as unnatural phenomena, while peasants doing organic farming with traditional means were elevated to the noblest of all people.

The movement had other facets, and its basic ideas can be described roughly as follows:

1.There may not be a God, but nature and genes are sacred.

2.Human beings are part of nature, and we must protect ourselves by keeping our genes clean and our food and medicines free of modern technology, and by limiting our numbers.

3.Man is spiritually and culturally related to the land from which he came. Urban life and modern technology is inversely unnatural and create a wedge between us and the Earth.

4.Rootless cosmopolitans such as immigrants and urbanites miss the bond with the land and are therefore often corrupt and decadent.⁴⁵⁹

The movement was an example of an austere and static mentality, which focused on protecting and cleaning what existed, while rejecting the new and alien. At the edge of this philosophy came homeopathy and other alternatives to science-based medicine.

Some of those ideas meshed well with communism, and in the 1940s Stalin launched a campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans” ( ), which he apparently thought were mainly Jews.⁴⁶⁰ However, the ideas resonated even better with the Nazis, or NSDAP, which it was officially called, an abbreviation which translates to National Socialist German Workers’ Party. One of the Nazis, biologist Ernst Lehmann, explained the essence of their philosophy with these words: “We understand that the separation of man from nature, from the whole of life, leads to man’s own downfall and death of nations.” He elaborated as follows:

“This quest for connectedness with life’s totality, with nature itself, a nature that we are born into, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought.”⁴⁶¹

Lehmann described Nazism as “politically performed biology”, and in his opinion, the return to nature is not only a part of the Nazi spirit, but it was its very core. Hitler expressed similar ideas in his book Mein Kampf, where he wrote: “When people try to go against nature’s iron law of logic, they come into conflict with the very principles that have given them their existence as a people. Their interventions against nature must lead to their downfall.”

He meant it. After his inauguration, Nazis implemented Europe’s most advanced nature protection laws, including the Tierschutzgesetz, Reichsjagdgesetz, Dauerwald and in 1935 Reichsnaturschutzgesetz. The Nazi Party also created Europe’s first nature reserves, and Hitler banned medical experiments on animals (but not on Jews).

How high a priority the Nazis gave to nature and farming was also reflected in the fact that the German Ministry of Agriculture, even until the middle of the war, retained the fourth-largest budget of all ministries. Agriculture minister Richard Walther Darré often made stirring speeches under the Blut und Boden banner, in which he argued for organic farming and, with agro-technical terminology, described Jews as Earth’s “weeds”. One source indicates that, in the end, it was he who was convinced Hitler and Himmler that Jews and Slavs were to be “weeded out” with poison gas.⁴⁶²

The Nazi Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture , Richard Walther Darré, holds a speech under the Blud und Boden banner in Goslar on December 13th, 1937

The Nazis were, in other words, obsessed with clean food, clean minds, healthy genes and clean bodies. Hitler himself was a dedicated ecologist and a supporter of homeopathy and also, at least from 1941, a vegetarian, as was Rudolf Hess, who was second to Hitler in terms of rank.

Nazis saw the Jews as enemies of nature and as alien to German soil. In the book, Giftpilz (poisonous fungus) the contrast between Jewish financiers and the Germanic rural population was highlighted. Jews lent money to farmers, it was explained, and then they forced them from their farms, when they could not pay these debts. In this way, these evil financiers separated Germans from their land and severed the vital blood ties.

The Blut und Boden movement formed a key element of the German zeitgeist and was reflected in many romantic books and plays, which idolized self-sufficiency and the romantic life of the country. There were also many Blut und Boden-inspired art exhibitions showing paintings of the romantic Germanic rural life. These would almost always show people performing manual labour without the presence of machines or other forms of new technology.

The movement had a broad support among German youth, including via Wandervogel, a youth group that aimed to get back to nature and freedom, and celebreated the “great outdoors”. It also fared well among conservationists, and an inventory from 1939 showed that 60% of the members of natural conservation associations also were registered members of the Nazi party, compared with only 10% of the general population.⁴⁶³

Perhaps one would think that all of this ended after the Nazis were crushed in World War II. However, it really didn’t, because the Blut und Boden movement soon reappeared in a new guise, and the essence remained largely the same: self-sufficiency, romanticizing traditional peasant life and the past, rejecting new technology and, to some extent, science, and supporting a general thinning of the human population. It has to be said, though, that few would now publically oppose racial mixing, although cultural mixing was often rejected. And as a clear example of the civilizing process in practice, no one advocated killing Jews anymore.

People considered inferior were another matter, though, and World Wildlife Fund co-founder Sir Julian Huxley had, in 1941, given his support to the forced sterilization of the unemployed and weak, and he had also suggested making it difficult for the weak to access healthcare, so they became less likely to survive and breed. He remained chairman of the British Eugenics Society from 1939 to 1962. Within the auspices of The World Wildlife Fund, he also worked also with Herbert Gruhl, who envisaged a strongly-armed ecological dictatorship that would provide “an optimum of military preparedness with a minimum of consumer satisfaction and therefore a much smaller utilization of natural resources.” Gruhl authored the bestselling book A Planet is Looted, where he suggested introducing a “dictatorship stricter than Stalin to ration the world’s resources.” He also co-founded the green Ökologisch-Demokratischen Partei (Ecologic Democratic Party). His main concern, apart from immigration and the mixture of cultures, was lack of resources, because as he explained:

“There is no doubt that the wars of the future will be fought over shares in the basic foundations of life -- that is, over the basis of nutrition and the increasingly precious fruits of the soil. Under these circumstances, future wars will far surpass in frightfulness all previous wars.”⁴⁶⁴

One of the renewed movement’s strongest forces, however, became the German party Die Grühne, founded in 1979 by Gert Bastian, his wife Petra Kelly and August Haussleiter, who became its first leader. However, in 1980 Haussleiter was forced to resign due to public criticism of his political background. He had, it turned out, in 1933, been editor of the Nazi and strongly anti-Semitic weekly magazine Fränkischer Kurier. Then he had volunteered as an SS officer and had served as such during World War II. In 1952, he described the Nuremberg war tribunal as the “most stupid and vile of all criminal courts.”

POPULAR NAZI EMBLEMS. TO THE LEFT, AN EMBLEM FOR WAFFEN SS, IN THE MIDDLE FOR THE PARTY, AND TO THE RIGHT FOR ITS BLUD UND BODEN MOVEMENT.

So Haussleiter still appeared somewhat Nazi-like in many people’s view, and it didn’t help that, after the war, he had co-founded an extremist party called Deutsche Gemeinschaft, which supported the incorporation of parts of Eastern Europe under a greater “socialist Germany.” This party was later banned under the country’s anti-Nazi legislation. Haussleiter’s interest in founding a German green party was mainly evoked by seeing how big, popular forces could be mobilized against nuclear power.

Gert Bastian, the second of the three founders of Die Grühne, was a former Nazi major general, who after the war, had been a founding member of the organization Krefelder Appell, which was supported by the East German Communist Party. His partner, Petra Kelly was the third founder. However, in October 1992, Gert shot Petra and then himself. The reason is unknown, but just before it happened, he had been informed that the Stasi archives were about to be opened, so it could have been out of fear of what one would find there – however, his file turned out to be empty.

Today, the Blut und Boden concept continues to offer broad appeal, and it constitutes the core of the dark green environmental mindset. Among those who, in recent years, have studied its roots and worldview more closely is Professor Peter Staudenmaier from Marquette University in Wisconsin. In his book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience, he concludes about the dark green:

“The “green wing” of the NSDAP was not a group of innocents, confused and manipulated idealists, or reformers from within; they were conscious promoters and executors of a vile program explicitly dedicated to inhuman racist violence, massive political repression and worldwide military domination. Their ‘ecological’ involvements, far from offsetting these fundamental commitments, deepened and radicalized them. In the end, their configuration of environmental politics was directly and substantially responsible for organized mass murder.”

Greenpeace is now recruiting members under the promise that they can be “ecowarriors” and, in April 2010, the following comment from Greenpeace’s Indian communications director Gene Hashmi appeared on its website:

“We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and scepticism.”

So, just like James Lovelock, Herbert Gruhl, Arnold Reize, Pentti Linkola and others, Hashmi apparently seemed to think that it could be ok to abolish democracy for the sake of the environment. He continued the statement by making personal threats against people with divergent opinions:

“If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fuelling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you are few.”

That was as plain-speaking as it gets, and the message disappeared from their site a short time later. Meanwhile, Greenpeace co-founder Paul Watson has moved on to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society which, for whatever reason, shows a human cranium on a black background.

A widely used strategy among dark greens has been to harass or terrorize scientific research, scientists and engineers until the latter’s work became so expensive that it had to be abandoned. Among their important tools are LNT, the precautionary principle and slippery slope arguments.

The dark green organizations are not democratically elected, and their activists are fortunately few, but their power is immense, and not many people dare speak openly against them. We have already looked at some of the typical consequences of their harassment in the form of extensive wasting of resources, often millions of unnecessary deaths, and paradoxically, also deterioration of our environment. We saw, for instance how their campaigns against nuclear energy led to resurgence of coal use with millions of additional deaths as a consequence, and how their campaign against DDT arguably killed additional tens of millions, via malaria. But here it is important to keep in mind that many dark green activists, in line with Malthus, actually welcome such side effects as ways of keeping down the population. As Pentti Linkola said: “When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.”⁴⁶⁵ And this: “Who misses all those who died in the Second World War? Who misses the twenty million executed by Stalin? Who misses Hitler’s six million Jews? Israel creaks with over crowdedness; in Asia minor, overpopulation creates struggles for mere square meters of dirt.”⁴⁶⁶

Yeah, cut them off! But surely, not all dark environmentalists can be evil; most are probably uninformed idealists, but as Nobel Prize winner TS Eliot once wrote, the indifference to the actual reality lead to much suffering:

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”⁴⁶⁷

Along with sister movement Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace has been a key player in preventing the use of golden rice, which, as previously described, is modified so that it contains a lot of beta-carotene, which alleviates vitamin A deficiency. A study in 2005 showed that 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women worldwide suffered from vitamin A deficiency which led to 1-2 million deaths annually, typically among children. This makes it almost as big a killer as malaria. In addition, every year, it leads to around 500,000 (some estimate 2-3 million) new cases of blindness and millions of cases of impaired vision and dry eyes and so on.⁴⁶⁸ This is a truly terrible problem, and in February 2012, the director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Ismail Serageldin, posed this question:

“I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want 2 to 3 million children a year to go blind and 1 million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way golden rice was created?”⁴⁶⁹

In September that year, bright green-ecologist Patrick Moore wrote an article which concluded:

“It is clear from the facts that Greenpeace is guilty of crimes against humanity as defined by the International Criminal Court. They claim that “Golden Rice is a failure” while they are the ones responsible for preventing the cure that is so desperately needed by millions of civilians. The fact that Greenpeace perpetuate lies about Golden Rice while at the same time doing nothing to solve the problem themselves constitutes gross negligence on top of the crime against humanity. Will someone please bring them to justice?”⁴⁷⁰

It should be noted that Patrick Moore actually was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but later left the organisation when he felt that it had been hijacked by people with destructive, anti-humanist and anti-scientific attitudes.

Technology and science is, as previously mentioned, central to Western civilization’s progress and future, and we have already looked at science’s most important principles such as impartiality, objectivity, logic, reasoned assumption, systematic doubt, source check, falsification, replicability, verification, peer reviews, and openness to criticism. The vast majority of scientists work roughly according to these principles, and scientists are therefore generally held in high esteem. However, not all live up to the fine reputation of this profession.

Aforementioned environment professor Stephen Schneider, who in 1970 published warnings of coming Ice Age and later changed his mind, became senior writer for the IPCC on global warming, and explained his mindset in 1989:

“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”⁴⁷¹

So he thought it was acceptable for scientists to distort the truth, if it served a good purpose, and he concluded further as follows: “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

Don’t we all, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Climate scientist Michael Mann is among those who have been criticized for giving particular priority to being efficient. The first time his name appeared in a wider circle, was in 1998, when he and two other researchers had an article published in the highly- regarded scientific journal Nature. It contained a reconstruction of the climate of the northern hemisphere from 1400 to 2000. “MBH98”, as this reconstruction was technically called, was soon renamed “the hockey stick”, as its graphic depiction looked a bit like a hockey stick – first straight for a long time, then suddenly rising sharply. The following year, it was updated to stretch from the year 1000.

The message of this graph was shocking: Between the year 1000 and the early 20th century, temperatures had been very stable with fluctuations rarely exceeding 0.5 degrees, but when CO2 emissions had increased sharply after World War II and especially after the 1970s, they had suddenly exploded upward. The conclusion seemed obvious: anthropogenic (man-made) emissions of CO2 were creating an unprecedented warming. This graph created a huge stir and appeared on thousands of websites and was notably distributed to all households by the Canadian government. Soon, it was by far the world’s most used illustration of the problem of global warming.

However, there were aspects of it that caused some raised eyebrows here and there. For example, what on earth had happened to the Little Ice Age, which was so well described in historical records? And what about the well-documented warm periods?

Shortly after the hockey stick graph had appeared, the magazine Climate Research published an analysis by two astrophysicists from Harvard, which contradicted Mann’s graph and concluded that recent climate variations were well within the normal range.⁴⁷²

What happened next is extraordinary. We have an unusual behind-the-scenes insight into the case, as an anonymous person leaked thousands of emails and other documents spanning a period of 13 years from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. Many of the climate scientists around Michael Mann immediately began to discuss how they could prevent researchers with different results than their own from getting these published. Thus wrote the director of the CRU, Phil Jones, on March 11th 2003 to some colleagues: “I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”⁴⁷³

Yes, that editor was really annoying, and Phil Jones had already complained to the magazine because they had published articles that contradicted his own on global warming. The editor that Jones wanted fired had acted quite correctly: He had sent the Harvard physicists’ article to an external scientist and asked him to send it on to five other experts of his choosing for peer review and thus also for an assessment of whether it was scientifically solid. The five had concluded that it was, and that was why it was published.

No matter, Michael Mann suggested his colleagues boycott the magazine by refraining from sending it articles for publication and never quoting research that had been printed in it. On April 22, Phil Jones wrote to his colleagues that he had told the magazine’s editor-in-chief that he would boycott the magazine.

Over the following months and years this pattern of trying to block the scientific debate was repeated in a number of other cases where leading climate scientists discussed how they could use boycotts, layoffs or withholding of data to prevent researchers with differing views from doing research and publishing results.⁴⁷⁴ When one scientist pointed out that a number of Chinese temperature data used in a report by Phil Jones were very sketchy, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research suggested the following in an email to Mann on April 21 2007: “So my feeble suggestion is to indeed cast aspersions on their motives and throw in some counter rhetoric. Labelling them as lazy with nothing better to do seems like a good thing to do.”

However, it was difficult for them to shut off all criticism. The same year that Mann’s hockey stick graph appeared, a Canadian mathematician named Stephen McIntyre asked Michael Mann if he could give him access to the hockey stick model used and the data behind it for checking, as McIntyre also wondered where previous temperature fluctuations had gone. McIntyre had, as a student, won a national mathematics competition and studied as a mathematician at Oxford University. Later, he had founded and managed a mining company and had subsequently worked as a consultant specializing in finding errors in statistical models. However, as he realized that the task at hand was significant, he asked Ross McKitrick, a Canadian economist specializing in environmental economics and policy analysis, to help him analyse the hockey stick.

It soon turned out that Michael Mann was not particularly welcoming to McIntyre and McKitrick. As shown in the correspondence - which went on for more than ten years and was later published on the internet and in various books - Mann first sent some wrong data and then announced that some of the information was missing. At one point they were told that they could not get the rest of Mann’s underlying climate data, as contracts with other countries’ climate research institutions prohibited the release to a third party. As McIntyre and McKitrick discovered that they had actually delivered the same data to other climate scientists, the explanation was changed to that the data could only be released to professional climate scientists and not to the Canadians. McIntyre and McKitrick arranged, therefore, that other climate scientists asked for the same data, but now the explanation was again changed; the data had been lost, they were told.

The general attitude to discussion and openness was quite clearly expressed as the Australian climate scientist Warwick Hughes after a month-long period of e-mail correspondence with Phil Jones about gaining access to raw climate data and formulas behind the Institute’s analyzes February 21, 2005 received the following final rejection:

“Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”⁴⁷⁵

As Phil Jones was summoned to a hearing by the UK government in March 2010, he explained away the extreme data secrecy among the climate scientists by saying that it was not standard practice among climate scientists to release data.⁴⁷⁶

As for McIntyre and McKitrick’s request for the software code (the statistical model), Mann refused to give it out on the grounds that it was verbally-described in his article and that it was, in any case, his private property, even though he was working for a public and taxpayer-funded university.

When no one could gain access to the code, it was evidently difficult to check Mann’s graph, and in 2005, the US government also asked for the code, to which Mann responded:

“My computer program is a piece of private, intellectual property, as the National Science Foundation and its lawyers recognize. It is a bedrock principle of American law that the government may not take private property “without [a] public use,” and “without just compensation.”⁴⁷⁷

So still no code after seven years of trying, and against this background, it seemed impossible to test how Mann had arrived at his graph.

The two Canadians tried to replicate Mann’s procedure based on his oral description of the code, but they could not, which process they described in an article published in 2003.⁴⁷⁸ However, a breakthrough came when they found some important lines of code between data series that Mann had sent them. These algorithms selected any data series that had been particularly volatile towards the end of the period and amplified them compared to other data series.

By inserting these in their replication model, McIntyre and McKitrick could finally get it to make hockey sticks. In fact, so much so, that when they combined combinations of random data (so-called red noise) more than 10,000 times, the model generated hockey sticks in over 99% of cases. And again: this was out of combinations of completely random data. When using the model on Mann’s actual data, they found that its hockey stick shape was generated by amplification of a single one of the many time series used: tree rings from California trees. This statistical time series went back to year 1404. Between the years 1421 and 1447 it was based on two trees, between 1404 and 1421 on a single tree, and before that, Mann had just added some fictitious numbers. The numbers came from an analysis by other scientists, who had concluded that the reason why three rings had been larger in recent years was not warming, but aerial fertilization (the aforementioned tendency for plants to grow faster, if the air contains more CO2).⁴⁷⁹

The biggest problem in all this is actually not that a small group of academics sacrifice basic scientific principles and choose to act as stealth political activists. The problem is that they get away with it and are even widely praised for it.

In the third assessment report from the leading science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in 2001, Mann’s hockey stick graph was reproduced no fewer than five times, including a very prominent colour illustrated version on page 29. This, despite the fact that Mann, who was then a relatively unknown scientist, still refused to hand over the data and code, which was why the graph had never been verified independently. It was also despite the fact that the graph totally contradicted a number of other climate reports and archaeological information as well as what had been stated in previous IPCC reports. It is therefore difficult to conclude anything else than that the graph was strongly promoted because the IPCC team liked its political power: it was effective.

The problem doesn’t end here, though, because Michael Mann has since been awarded a number of honours for his scientific work. And so has our serial catastrophist Paul Ehrlich; in fact, so much so, that a simple list of his honours and awards would fill approximately two A4 pages. Among the many organizations that have praised his research in such ways (and often with prizes totalling millions of dollars) are The Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Volvo, the UN, the Albert Einstein Club, Ecological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the Royal Society of London. If these organizations have a problem with a scientist being completely divorced from reality, they certainly don’t show it.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget that Erlich also received the MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, along with a substantial pot of money. This was in 1990, where it was clear that his forecasts had been spectacularly wrong.

You couldn’t make this up, but there is another side to the matter that is equally grotesque. For while this circus is continuing, there are tens of thousands of serious scientists who are indeed interested in the impartial and objective search for the truth, but who spend their careers in relative anonymity and economic modesty. Day after day, these scientists actually stick to the dry figures and the scientific methods, which mean they are less likely to receive big awards, let alone genius prizes.

And they find it hard to go against the politically-tainted mass movements. On 12 April 2006, Richard Lindzen, who was a professor of atmospheric physics at MIT, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal in which he stated: “Scientists who dissent from alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libelled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse.”

Julian Simon experienced the same phenomenon in 1980 when, in the journal Science, he showed that the scientific statistics in no way indicated that population growth had created a lack of resources; rather the contrary. Ehrlich responded that to explain to someone like Julian Simon that commodities would become scarce when the population grew “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.” Of the peer reviewers who had approved Simon’s article, Ehrlich wrote: “Could the editors have found someone to review Simon’s manuscript who had to take off his shoes to count to 20?” Similarly Bjørn Lomborg received an explicit political firing from the Danish government after he published the book The Skeptical Environmentalist, where he referred to the 2,930 sources step-by-step to explain how certain environmental scientists and activists often had misrepresented data massively.

The Economist, in October 2013, published a story about increasing problems with scientific errors, which pointed out that private companies often found it very difficult to replicate the results of public research.⁴⁸⁰ For instance, the biopharmaceutical company Amgen had tried to replicate 53 leading international studies about cancer and was unable to replicate 47, even though they often worked closely with the public researchers who had made the initial experiments.⁴⁸¹ Similarly, Bayer HealthCare could only replicate approximately one-quarter of 67 published health studies.⁴⁸²

One of the problems here is that it is far easier to get analysis published, if it shows something new, surprising or dramatic, like Mann’s hockey stick graph did. However, the reason such results meet those criteria are often that they are actually wrong - there have been deliberate or unintentional errors in the research process.

One might assume that such errors are likely to be discovered quickly by other researchers? Not necessarily. Since new and dramatic research provides much more publicity (and thus more research grants and awards), fewer and fewer scientists deal with the so-called “negatives” - studies that attempt to verify others’ research while looking for erroneous data and conclusions, as McIntyre and McKitrick did with Mann’s work. This is confirmed by a study of 4,000 research reports from between 1990 and 2007, which showed that the proportion of published negatives decreased from 30% to 14% during the period.⁴⁸³ In addition, it is quite normal for scientists to publish insufficient information to enable others to test their results properly. In a study of 238 biomedical reports published in scientific magazines, 84 concluded that more than half omitted information necessary for replicating their experiments.⁴⁸⁴

Let’s conclude this chapter by simply noting, that while pursuit of science and technology has been absolutely central to our progress for centuries, it has always had its enemies and abusers; from clerics and others imposing scientific censorship to political agitators bending scientific principles and Luddites opposing new technologies to romantics turning blind eyes to whatever contradict their illusions. Similar problems are clearly still with us today.