Post by cjm on Mar 11, 2018 3:57:32 GMT
Global Warming: Real, Or Groupthink?
The report authors do not mince their words. “How do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications?” asks Professor Richard Lindzen, in the foreword. Lindzen was professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until retiring in 2013.
The answer, says report author and journalist Christopher Booker, lies in groupthink – the tendency for members of groups of like-minded people to bolster their collective view and ignore or rubbish alternative views. Professor Irving Janis pioneered work on groupthink in the 1970s, identifying eight characteristics of groupthink behaviour: an illusion of invulnerability shared by most group members; collective rationalising to discount warnings; unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality; stereotyped views of rivals and enemies as evil; direct pressure on any group members with differing views; self-censorship of individuals’ own thoughts so as to water down doubts; a shared illusion of unanimity; and self-appointed ‘mindguards’ who protect the group from adverse information.
The answer, says report author and journalist Christopher Booker, lies in groupthink – the tendency for members of groups of like-minded people to bolster their collective view and ignore or rubbish alternative views. Professor Irving Janis pioneered work on groupthink in the 1970s, identifying eight characteristics of groupthink behaviour: an illusion of invulnerability shared by most group members; collective rationalising to discount warnings; unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality; stereotyped views of rivals and enemies as evil; direct pressure on any group members with differing views; self-censorship of individuals’ own thoughts so as to water down doubts; a shared illusion of unanimity; and self-appointed ‘mindguards’ who protect the group from adverse information.
“Future generations may look back on the late-20th and early 21st-century panic over man-made warming as one of the strangest episodes in the history of either science or politics,” says Booker. “But they will only be able to understand how such an extraordinary flight from reality could have taken place by reference to the peculiarities of collective human psychology, and in particular to the rules defining the nature of groupthink.”
The world has seen triumphs of groupthink before, he says, pointing to religion and Marxism. “In crucial respects the ideology of global warming has much in common with these examples. Like them, it originated with only a very small group of people, who had become gripped by a visionary idea. Like them, it was based on predictions of a hypothetical future – or prophecies – which could not be definitively proved right or wrong. Like them it therefore became important to insist that this belief-system must be subscribed to by a ‘consensus’ of all right-thinking people, and using every kind of social, political and psychological pressure to enforce conformity with it. And like them this inevitably shaped the response to anyone who would not be a part of it, who therefore had to be condemned as a ‘heretic’, a ‘subversive’ or a ‘denier’, and whose dissent had to be more or less ruthlessly suppressed.”
Richard Lindzen says the UK leads the world in climate groupthink. “Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world,” he says.
The world has seen triumphs of groupthink before, he says, pointing to religion and Marxism. “In crucial respects the ideology of global warming has much in common with these examples. Like them, it originated with only a very small group of people, who had become gripped by a visionary idea. Like them, it was based on predictions of a hypothetical future – or prophecies – which could not be definitively proved right or wrong. Like them it therefore became important to insist that this belief-system must be subscribed to by a ‘consensus’ of all right-thinking people, and using every kind of social, political and psychological pressure to enforce conformity with it. And like them this inevitably shaped the response to anyone who would not be a part of it, who therefore had to be condemned as a ‘heretic’, a ‘subversive’ or a ‘denier’, and whose dissent had to be more or less ruthlessly suppressed.”
Richard Lindzen says the UK leads the world in climate groupthink. “Booker’s emphasis on the situation in the UK is helpful insofar as there is nowhere that the irrationality of the response to this issue has been more evident, but the problem exists throughout the developed world,” he says.