Climate change: a moral panic

By Richard North - November 8, 2022

I think we should have a national Climate Change Day, similar to the Purge when, for one day in the year, those that wish to do so can tell all the horror stories they like about the end of the world as we know it.

The payback is that for the rest of the year, the scaremongers leave us alone; the BBC and the media generally are prohibited from running stories about climate change, politicians are likewise constrained, and activists are subject to criminal penalties if they speak out of turn.

This might seem draconian, but something must be done to restore a sense of equilibrium to national and global politics, to stop this wave of madness which is distorting priorities and distracting governments throughout the world from concentrating on what really matters.

The thing is that we are not dealing with science here, but a belief system which has captured the senses of otherwise intelligent people, and some not so intelligent, to the extent that climate change doctrine has a stronger grip on the collective mind than any new religion ever did, even if it shares the same characteristics.

Anyone who has studied the history of the climate change cult will be aware that the belief preceded the “science” and the scientific community – such that it is – is in the grip of a powerful and seductive a priori hypothesis, driving a confirmation bias which is serving to exclude rational thought.

That “scientists” go off the rails is not unusual. That the “collective” is prone to fads and fancies is as old as science itself and can be seen in a wide range of disciplines. My first, direct exposure to the phenomenon was in the 1988 Salmonella in eggs scare.

Then, the relevant part of the scientific community had convinced itself that the emergence of a particular strain of Salmonella, Salmonella enteritidis phage type 4, had somehow infected the commercial egg producing flocks of many nations to cause a global epidemic of Salmonella food poisoning, becoming the sole and exclusive cause of the spread of this novel phage type.

The thesis was buoyed by a substantial number of supposedly scientific papers and, in the UK, by at least one sentinel paper which was demonstrably fraudulent, but the flood of papers, peer reviewed and in journals of impeachable credentials, was enough to convince national politicians to act.

This was soon to take on international dimensions, with a raft of legislation pouring from the European Union, from the United States and then adopted, through global agencies, by many countries throughout the world.

At the height of the scare, you would have had trouble finding any scientist in the field of microbiology, or related disciplines, who disagreed with the prevailing thesis on the “danger” of eggs, even though the number of scientists directly involved in the cutting-edge research on the safety of eggs you could count on the fingers of one hand.

Through laborious research, I evaluated the investigations of over 60 high-profile food poisoning outbreaks – some of which involved real-time analysis while the official investigations were still being carried out. Of the sixty-plus outbreaks officially attributed to “infected eggs”, I could only attribute one to an infected flock, and then there were special circumstances which gave rise to the outbreak.

In parallel, I also relied on the work of two, US west coast scientists who had revisited work carried out in the 1950s on Salmonella infection in poultry which demonstrated, unequivocally, that infected laying hens rarely transmitted the bacteria to the eggs they produced, and then only in very small numbers, for a very short period until the hens’ immune systems kicked in.

Owing to the complex biochemistry of the egg, it then proved impossible for the bacteria in the egg (introduced in vivo, as opposed to experimental injection, in a flawed technique used by some prominent British scientists) to multiply, ruling out fresh egg consumption as a source of illness – Salmonellosis is most often a high-dose illness, requiring the consumption of thousands of bacteria.

During my work, though – which formed the basis of my PhD research – I experienced the full weight of “establishment” science seeking to obstruct my efforts, with senior scientists instructed not to talk to me, access to flocks denied, laboratory tests blocked and official cover-ups of fraudulent work.

After Salmonella, there was the Listeria scare, with one very prominent scientist asserting that the cause of a perceived epidemic of Listeria monocytogenes was the growing use of cook-chill techniques in catering, and the widespread retail sale of chilled ready-meals.

In the end, the increased incidence (against a normal low-level background) attributed to an “epidemic” was shown to be a single outbreak associated with imported Swiss soft cheese, but not before the introduction of massive new controls on chilled food production which, in many instances, made the use of cook-chill in catering impractical.

And then, of course, there was BSE, which had official scientists predicting half a million cases of the associated disease of CJD, with the UK in quarantine and the Channel Tunnel blocked with concrete.

The actual CJD case rate turned out to be hundreds and while the official explanation attributed BSE to a change in rendering practices, this never held water, not least as the changes were introduced Europe-wide and were current in the US, yet the UK remained the epicentre of the incidence in cattle.

To this day, the explanations have never really answered all the questions yet, through the course of the epidemic, we saw the same determination of the “establishment” science to “own” the disease and enforce the “consensus” view, supported by rigorous and ruinously expensive government action which nearly brought the meat trade to its knees.

Thus, from direct experience at the sharp end, I know all about scientific “consensus” and how a small group of scientists can push an agenda which is then accepted and defended by a majority who have no direct experience or involvement in the base research.

And when, in the late 1980s and into the 90s, “global warming” began to emerge as a “thing”, I and my late colleague Christopher Booker cast the same critical eye over what looked to be following the same dynamics as the earlier food scares.

We followed intensely the early shenanigans and saw fraudulent work, political agendas, misrepresentation of science and all the hallmarks of a scare, or “moral panic” as it was called in academia.

We thus included global warming in our book, Scared to Death, which is still in print and recently updated. Then Booker went on to describe the development of the scare in his more detailed book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, first published in 2009.

Nothing I have seen since has given me cause to change my mind about the nature of this scare. No matter how much the BBC and the rest of the media prattle on about “extreme weather events”, for all the phenomena we are witnessing, there are other explanations which may have equal or greater validity.

To say that the whole of science (meaning established science) cannot be wrong, and to deny that the governments of the world have been misled (or have misled themselves), is to fail to understand the scare dynamic.

Throughout history – from the “witch trials” to the modern-day food scares – we have seen how “moral panics” can grip not just nations but span continents and drive out any dissenting views.

Some may assert that in our liberal, “enlightened” society, the scare dynamic could not take root so deeply, or for so long (bearing in mind that the witch scare lasted more than 300 years), but it would be hard to argue that society has developed an immunity to the moral panic process, which has been so evident in recent times.

At the outset of the BSE “scare” I was asked to write an op-ed for a newspaper, which I did, trying to counter some of the more extreme claims. The newspaper did not use my piece, instead choosing to run with the scare, calculating that this would enhance circulation figures.

Today, we have the same choice – to counter the increasingly manic claims or to run with the scare, with all the costs and disruption that this will bring. To mind, the choice is simple, made easier by observing those who support the scare, and the ease with which bad data infiltrates politics.