Great, Great Article On GroupThink And Anthropogenic Global Warming -- February 25, 2018

At the Science & Environmental Policy Project weekly archives, click on "Feb 24, 2018" and a PDF will quickly download.

From the monograph, a nice definition of Groupthink:

Groupthink describes systematic errors made by groups when making collective decisions. It was popularized by Research Psychologist Irving Janis in his 1982 book of that title. Janis used it to describe the poor US preparation, despite warnings, for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the failed US-supported invasion of Castro’s Cuba in 1961. His work suggests that pressures for conformity restrict independent and critical thinking by individuals of the group, biasing the group’s analyses.

The forward is written by

Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, emeritus, of MIT, discusses how well this concept applies to the Climate Establishment and its promotion of fear of carbon dioxide (CO2)-caused dire global warming:

“…Booker’s relatively brief monograph asks a rather different but profoundly important question. Namely, how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications. Booker convincingly shows the power of ‘groupthink’ to overpower the rational faculties that we would hope could play some role. The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect…”

Janis's three rules of groupthink and the author explaining his book:

Janis’s first rule is that a group of people come to share a particular way of looking at the world which may seem hugely important to them but which turns out not to have been based on looking properly at all the evidence. It is therefore just a shared, untested belief.

Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief, they like to insist that it is supported by a “consensus”. The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it.

This leads on to the third rule, which is that they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief. Anyone holding a contrary view must simply be ignored, ridiculed and dismissed as not worth listening to.

What my paper does is look again at the entire global warming story in the light of Janis’s rules, and to show how consistently they explain so much of the way it has unfolded all the way through.

This is what I did not know:

The alarm over man-made climate change was first exploded on the world in 1988 by a tiny group of scientists who had become convinced that, because both CO2 levels and global temperatures were rising, one must be the cause of the other. Unless something very drastic was done, they urged, the planet was heading for catastrophe.

In November that year two of these fervent believers in what they called “human-induced climate change” were authorised to set up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. This would report to the world’s politicians on the basis of computer models programmed, according to their theory, to predict just how fast the world was likely to heat up over the next 100 years.

With startling speed, their theory was soon proclaimed as being supported by a scientific “consensus”, backed by governments, all the main scientific journals and institutions, environmental pressure groups and the media.

In fact right from the start, many scientists, like the eminent physicist Richard Lindzen of MIT, were highly sceptical, both of the theory itself and of those computer models. These, as Lindzen wrote, were so narrowly focused on CO2 that they were far too simplistic to allow for all the other natural factors which shape the earth’s climate.
“But such dissenters were ignored.

And for nearly 20 years the ‘consensus’ rolled on, ever more extreme in its apocalyptic claims, with each new IPCC report scarier than the last. By 2006 Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was outdoing them all.”