A HERD MENTALITY & GROUPTHINK

It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. Our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.’

The overwhelming need for many individuals to blindly and unquestioningly follow others is commonly known as ‘mob mentality’ , ‘herd mentality’ or ‘Groupthink’. It is a manifestation of consensus thinking and blind adherence to peer group pressure irrespective of the facts or consequences. Most sensible people who are not financially dependent upon the climate change gravy train are sensible enough to fully realise man cannot control climate and extreme weather. Yet, incredible though it may seem, there still remain some, who are otherwise intelligent, who still believe the claims of reversible impending human caused climatic destruction of the entire globe. How can this be? What drives people to cling to such strange and extreme beliefs? The connection between climate change hysteria and groupthink is blindingly obvious. This connection has been noted by Paul MacRae, Author of False Alarm,  who comments: “But it’s baffling that alarmist climate scientists are so certain that additional carbon dioxide will produce a climate disaster, even though there is little empirical evidence to support this view, and much evidence against it, including decades of non-warming. This dogmatism makes it clear, at least to those outside the alarmist climate paradigm, that something is very wrong with the state of “consensus” climate science. There are many possible reasons for this scientific blindness, including sheer financial and career self-interest: scientists who don’t accept the alarmist paradigm will lose research grants and career doors will be closed to them. But one psychological diagnosis fits alarmist climate science like a glove: groupthink. With groupthink, we get the best explanation of “how can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong…………It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares .all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus………Climate scientists who dare to deviate from the consensus are censured as “deniers”—a choice of terminology that can only be described as odious. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explicitly aims for “consensus” in its reports—it does not publish minority reports, and yet it is impossible that its alleged more than “2,000 scientists” could completely agree on a subject as complicated as climate……..Climate alarmists will, of course, angrily dispute that climate science groupthink is as strong as claimed here. However, groupthink is clearly identified in the 2006 Wegman report into the Michael Mann hockey stick controversy.

MacRae concludes: In short, it is clear that groupthink—a later, more scientific word for “tribalism”—is strongly at work within alarmist climate science, however much the affected scientists refuse to recognize it. As a result of tribalism (groupthink), alarmist climate science makes assertions that are often extreme (polarized), including the explicit or implicit endorsement of claims that global warming will lead to “oblivion,” “thermageddon,” mass extinctions, and the like. Indeed, one of the ironies of climate science is that extremist AGW believers like Gore, Hansen, Schneider have succeeded in persuading the media and public that those who don’t make grandiose claims, the skeptics, are the extremists. Group polarization offers a rational explanation for extreme alarmist claims, given that the empirical scientific evidence is simply not strong enough to merit such confidence. It is likely that even intelligent, highly educated scientists have been caught in what has been called the “madness of crowds.” Indeed, writing in the Times Higher Education magazine, British philosopher Martin Cohen makes this connection explicit:
‘Is belief in global-warming science another example of the “madness of crowds”? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible “authority”. There is strong psychological evidence that alarmist fears of climate change are far more the result of groupthink and the group polarization process than scientific evidence and, yes, this alarmist groupthink has indeed led to the triumph of irrationality over reason.”
The diagnosis is clear, but what is the treatment, both curative and preventative?

Could it be that, belief in human-caused, catastrophic global warming, indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality ?.

28 Comments

  1. Ruben says:

    We would to be on track for a one degree C increase in global temperature every 100 years (about 0.10 C per decade) if the pre-war data was not guess work .. unreliable to say the least! There were different methods used by NOAA to measure temperatures prior to 1998. As a result the temperatures for 1997 and 1995 were nearly two degrees warmer than the average temperatures today! “The global average temperature of 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit for 1997 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1995 by 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit. The chart reflects variations from the 30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures” .

    1. Florida Mansions says:

      NOAA average annual global temperatures ((Land and Sea) has been on a par with most other temperature data reports except for the years 2015, 2016 and 2017 where NOAA’s readings have been higher.
      2015 at 14.80 C compared to other data sets 14.76 C.
      2016 at 14.84 C compared to other data sets 14.80 C
      2017 at 14.74 C compared to other data sets 14.68 C.
      The 2015 data was published on the eve of the Paris Climate conference.
      The average global temperatures for the period 2010 to 2107 is 14.60 C.

      1. Anonyme says:

        The mean temperature between 1961-90 would have been less than 14 degrees Celsius. (57.2 degrees Fahrenheit). So the average global temperature for 1997, including the anomaly, was less than 14.42 C not 16.92 C as the NOAA report suggests. Apparently this flawed method of calculation had been going on for at least the previous 10 years

    2. Ike says:

      This is typical of the scare campaign at that time. I have located another article with the same calculation from NOAA so it was not a misprint. 16.5 degrees C is nearly two degrees Celsius above the current world temperature.
      “1997 was the warmest year of this century, based on land and ocean surface temperature data”, reports a team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC.
      Led by the Center’s Senior Scientist Tom Karl, the team analyzed temperatures from around the globe during the years 1900 to 1997 and back to 1880 for land areas. For 1997, land and ocean temperatures averaged three quarters of a degree Fahrenheit (F) (0.42 degrees Celsius (C)) above normal. (Normal is defined by the mean temperature, 61.7 degrees F (16.5 degrees C), for the 30 years 1961-90). The 1997 figure exceeds the previous warm year, 1990, by 0.15 degrees F (0.08 degrees C).
      The record-breaking warm conditions of 1997 continues the pattern of very warm global temperatures. Nine of the past eleven years have been the warmest on record.

  2. Cool Hand says:

    We have just 96 months to save world, said Prince Charles on the eighth of July 2009 which gives us less than two months before the thermageddon. The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace that he had “calculated” that we have just 96 months left to save the world.
    In the case of climate change his views have been well known, indeed he has been warning of the threat of global warming to our environment for over 30 years. Carbon markets are just one example that the prince has championed since the 1990s, and which he continues to promote today.

  3. Arcadian says:

    What better example could there be than what happened in Nazi Germany and Japan before and during the second world war. I returned to both countries in 1967 and found that their people were no different to us, polite and friendly as if the war had never occurred.

  4. Val Adami says:

    Fifty four (54) years out of the last seventy seven (77) years, (since 1940), there had been no discernible warming.
    According to the IPPC up to 49% of the warming, that was detected in the remaining twenty three (23) years, which was about 0.74 degrees Celsius, up to 0.36 degrees Celsius could have been due to natural forces.
    I believe that to be the reason why they switched from global warming to climate change.

    1. Seldom Seen says:

      On those figures, the AGW, if it could be proven, would amount to about 0.50 C per century. But there is no way to measure the variation in the earth’s orbit, the change in solar radiance or the change in the angle of the earth’s axis that could be used in predicting the extent of natural warming.

  5. Valcurl says:

    America kept the scare going by appointing John Holdren as the climate adviser, thanks to Obama who said, after taking office, judge me by those who surround me!!
    John Holdren had predicted a billion deaths from climate-related famine by the end of this decade. Since then, famine has plummeted and billions have longer life expectancy thanks to fossil fuel-powered industrialization and agriculture. He also predicted the need to introduce compulsory castration when the world population got out of hand. Holdren and his sidekick Paul Ehrlich, both previous supporters of a looming ice age, had assisted Al Gore in the preparation of his global warming documentary The Inconvenient Truth.

    1. Florida Mansions says:

      Holdren has no place in science let alone as a climate adviser to the president. The republicans were 6-1 with bookmakers on the eve of the election and the early polling suggested a landslide victory for the democrats, instead Trump won in a canter. So what went wrong? I have always believed that this catastrophic warming fear was overdone and Trump did too when he called it all B******t during the campaign.

  6. Ian Billet says:

    The Paris accord is now dead after America’s withdrawal. Countries like India and China will not be affected because they were never really keen on the agreement anyway even though they were, unlike the U S, allowed to continue building coal fired power stations and Australia will continue to export all the coal they need. People seem to forget that we owe our way of life to fossil fuels, everything we touch or use in our everyday life. It was not a proper agreement anyway just a whole heap of papers stapled together with the signatories going in all directions.

  7. Heather says:

    This whole business about global warming seems a bit far fetched. The world climate has been remarkably stable over the last century if it has only warmed by one degree Celsius. The fact that we could accurately measure, let alone predict, the temperature so precisely in such a chaotic weather system is incredible.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had said “future climate change cannot be predicted. … the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”
    We should concentrate more on cleaning the rubbish from our oceans and reducing the world poverty.

    1. Harley Kitchen says:

      We got caught up the global warming groupthink in the late 80’s and believed the world was in trouble with all the carbon dioxide we were emitting that was acting as a greenhouse gas and heating up the planet. We relied on what we were told by the scientists and politicians, who were milking it, because we did not have access to data like today where information on climate is readily available on the internet. The warming rate of the earth, approximately 1 degree Celsius per century, is not unusual nor is it unprecedented. The medieval warming period was much warmer than it is today. This was confirmed in the climate IPCC assessment but later removed when Michael Mann produced the infamous hockey stick graph which removed the ancient warming period and the little ice age altogether using flawed tree ring data to prove that the current global warming is unprecedented. Doctor Wegman, summed it up perfectly ‘There is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility”.

      .

      1. Havelochy says:

        There is no harm in using renewable energy where it is practical. But intermittent power on a wide scale is to expensive and unreliable at the moment. Nuclear power could be the answer if it can be made safe.

  8. Coxy says:

    “It is a manifestation of consensus thinking and blind adherence to peer group pressure irrespective of the facts or consequences”. I could not agree more. On top of that there are financial rewards (grants) for those “scientists” who support it…..and there you have it in a nutshell.

  9. Ike says:

    World temperatures have warmed slightly but not enough to explain the reduction in frosty mornings. I had a paper round when we lived in Newmarket, Melbourne back in the late 40’s early 50’s, and practically every winter morning there would be a sea of white everywhere and we would have to wear gloves to stop our fingers from becoming numb. It was still frosty in the late morning when we walked to school. We have reduced pollution both in industry and in the home where everyone had an incinerator in their back yard to dispose of flammable waste and in the autumn months you would have this pleasant smell as the council workers burnt the leaves in the gutter. In those days only wealthy people owned cars but today practically every household owns two cars. Could it be that the exhaust fumes from petrol driven vehicles have something to do with it??

  10. Robert Naismith says:

    There was no concerns about climate variability until the money (the grants) came for it. Where there is money there is corruption and greed, that’s how it works today. Look what is coming out of the Royal Commission investigating the banks. Stop the climate grants and the world will cool!!
    It is the incidence of cheating and criminal behavior that is rising not the temperature. Why the ABC got involved in this shady climate scam is beyond reason.

  11. Arnold says:

    When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true. The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end.
    Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

    I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

    Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment, go on wanting their salaries and prestige.
    Excerpt from and article by Clive James

  12. Nick says:

    This is a statement from David Suzuki, the ABC climate change poster boy, when giving a lecture on Global Warming: “We are familiar with this effect in a car that has sat in the sun”. “The interior becomes hot because the carbon in the glass keeps the heat in”.

  13. Courvent says:

    None of the catastrophic predictions have come true nor have they produced one skerrick of proof that man is involved in climate change which makes me wonder how much longer this scam can go on before it unravels. The Democrats, thanks to Obama and Kerry, face a long period in the wilderness when this hoax of the century collapses.

  14. Diane says:

    NASA: The Earth Cooled by Half a Degree Celsius From 2016-2018
    The average global temperature dropped by more than half a degree Celsius from February 2016 to February 2018, according to the just published NASA data.
    According to NASA the average temperature around the world fell 0.56 degrees Celsius during that time period, the biggest dip in temperatures since a decrease of 0.47 degrees Celsius from Years 1982-1984.
    The data came from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
    The overall temperature change during the recent 2-year period was the result of 2 shorter changes, from February to June 2016, which turned in the largest 5 month drop in history, and February to June 2017.
    There were several claims in Years 2013 and 2014 the Earth was entering a global cooling period, which was predicted to last until the middle of the this century.
    A former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant even released a book in Year 2014 that predicted the world was being struck by a 30-year cold spell.

    NASA were quiet open about it even though it was not reported in the press. It does not mean that it is the end of the warming period but a drop of 0.56 degrees C is significant when you consider that the earth had warmed by only 1.0 degree C since 1880.

  15. Trevor Lee says:

    Has this sharp drop in temperature been caused by global warming? The reason I ask is because they tell us that any extreme weather event is the result of global warming.

  16. Jacob says:

    Not surprisingly ABC have criticised the timing of the NASA report that showed record cooling after their Four Corners program had just aired interviews with selected farmers whose crops were allegedly effected by recent warming. If this rate of cooling is sustained throughout 2018 we could see global temperatures plummet to the same levels as in the early 1980’s.

  17. Arsenal says:

    I used to listen to BBC radio every Sunday afternoon in the seventies, a sort of science show. They were telling us that all the dust from man’s activities was creating a sort of blanket around the earth and preventing the sun’s rays from warming the earth. The government was accused of not revealing it to the public….Suppression of Information they were saying.
    There was a further warning that came in a major television documentary showing that international scientists have changed their minds about the speed with which the world’s “weather machine” can change gear.”The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind”,said science writer Nigel Calder, who compiled the program for the British Broad casting Corporation.

  18. raymond says:

    Until their is proof to the contrary that global warming is happening, as a result of man’s carbon dioxide emissions, we should stick to what we agreed to in Paris. The mining of coal must be phased out as our power stations close down. The adoption of renewable energy sources is vital in the reduction of carbon pollution and so to is the cessation of coal exportation otherwise our efforts to reduce carbon will be a waste of time. …One in all in!!

  19. Goodwin says:

    “Car dealers also urged the government not to deliver a “shock” to the industry, warning the proposed policy “may lead to a ­reduction in new-car sales”.
    The Australian revealed yesterday that a tough standard — 105g of CO2 per kilometre — remains an option for the Turnbull government, which has pledged to lower the carbon emissions of the nation’s vehicles in line with its Paris Agreement commitment.
    This news item in the Australian newspaper might cause alarmists to break from the herd and question the global warming science. But the converted might look at it differently by saying if we don’t vote for Turnbull we are “deniers”.
    China and India and other nations who are doing nothing will be laughing at us..

  20. Charles says:

    The 97% of CO2 in the atmosphere which is produced by volcanoes, oceans, soil, vegetation, microbes, plants, etc, is apparently ‘good’ CO2 and won’t change the climate.
    However, it is the 3% of CO2 in the atmosphere which is produced by humans that is ‘bad’ and can influence the climate. Have faith…shut up and believe!

    1. Rohan says:

      Nowhere in this discussion do we see evidence of future calamity, nor do we see calamity from GHGs at any time-point…whether it be 2050, 2100, 2250, or 2500. And one thing is painfully obvious: when it is accepted that the current alarmism is fraudulent, there will be no ‘oh sorry’, there will be no memory, no lesson learnt…and the sorry spectacle of doomsdayism will recur over and over like something depicted in a Stephen King novel…eg The Stand

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