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September 28, 2022

In the early 1970s I was a disaffected youth. I began working at the nonprofit Zero Population Growth. We promoted the idea that exploding human population would soon make the world uninhabitable.

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The president of our organization went on the Johnny Carson television show. Sacks of mail, often with checks, arrived. The psychological effect was intoxicating.

One of our directors, a college professor, suggested that vending machines could sell suicide pills as a method of reducing the population.  We did everything possible to shut that bad idea down. Not for moral reasons but to protect the organization. We wanted more members, more influence, and more money. Our motivation had changed from saving the Earth to getting more money and power.

Everything that Zero Population Growth promoted turned out to be wrong. The “population bomb” was a dud. There were no famines. People became better nourished even in the poorest countries. Rather than exponentially growing population, population growth slowed and even crashed in the richer countries. I learned a lifelong lesson of skepticism.

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Thirty years later I retired from my work as an engineer and began what became a ten-year study of climate change. I went to scientific conferences and worked hard at making friends with climate scientists. I realized that the science predicting future doom from emissions of carbon dioxide was wildly speculative. Individual climate scientists did good work but accurately predicting the future climate was not realistic. I could not but help notice a climate of fear that prevented scientists from opposing the climate doom narrative. The labs and universities that employed scientists did not want any dissident voices that might torpedo the flow of money from Washington.

This was all predicted in the 1961 farewell address by President Eisenhower. He was worried that the science establishment, that he called the scientific-technical elite, would warp science to influence government policy for its own benefit.

/Dwight Eisenhower was a greatly underestimated President. His practical insight into human nature is illustrated by the fact that he made loads of money playing poker while in the Army. He also graduated first in his class out of 240 senior officers at the Army War College. Although President Eisenhower was usually depicted as a lightweight by the media, his insights were uncannily accurate.

Today’s climate crisis is a modern example of public policy being ruined by a self-interested scientific-technological elite. World governments are spending trillions to avoid an imaginary climate crisis. Bizarrely, the methods selected to avoid the crisis — windmills and solar panels — can’t possibly accomplish much, even if the crisis were real.

Climate scientists think they are engaged in one of the hard sciences. But climate science is actually a soft science because its conclusions depend on the statistical analysis of noisy and dubious data using complicated and opaque computerized models. It is the perfect setup for confirmation bias, the tendency for scientists to arrive at conclusions that support their preconceived prejudices. Worse than confirmation bias is lying and fakery in the pursuit of money and power, also not unknown.

There are plenty of climate scientists who have doubts, but they have to keep their doubts hidden. They are employees of large institutions and they have families and mortgages. The scientists that speak out are either retired or have impregnable positions due to exceptional scientific accomplishment. Among professional climate scientists, public opposition to the climate doom theory is rare, but it does happen — I know of one climate scientist that forged a successful career as a denier, running over his opponents with raw courage and entrepreneurial talent.