Conspiracy Central...

It struck me the other day that there are some remarkable parallels between 9/11 conspiracy theories and the argument that man-made global warming is a “hoax,” even to the point that some of the people advocating these ideas are the same. Both these propositions are liable to attract people from the extremes of the political spectrum – 9/11 conspiracies from both leftists and right-wing anti-government libertarians (such as radio talk-show host Alex Jones), global warming conspiracies from both libertarian and authoritarian right-wingers (such as UKIP and the BNP) and revolutionary communists such as “Great Global Warming Swindle” producer Martin Durkin.

Both theories rely on what Ben Goldacre has described as “zombie arguments,” that is to say they crop up time and time again, no matter how many times they are refuted. In the case of 9/11, there is the argument that the fall of the twin towers must have been due to controlled demolition – the main reason being that jet fuel will only burn at around 1000°C whereas steel only melts at 2700°C. This is perfectly true, but structural steel loses around 50% of its strength at 800°C and 90% at 1000°C so that hardly proves that the building (consisting of hundreds of tons of masonry) couldn’t have collapsed under its own weight. Quite apart from this, there is the incredible ingenuity that would have been needed to smuggle some unspecified number of explosives experts into the building and to allow them to rig a perfectly controlled demolition, all of which would presumably have had to be done without the security staff or anyone else in the building noticing anything untoward. There’s also the fact that the building collapsed from above the level of the aircraft impact first – exactly as you would expect if it fell under its own weight. This could have been reproduced under the conditions of controlled demolition, but for it to work the engineers would have had to have extraordinarily accurate knowledge about where the aeroplane was going to hit - and so on. Some conspiracy theorists maintain that the planes were not passenger aircraft, but instead military fuel carriers and that they had “no windows” – despite the fact that windows can clearly be seen in sections of the fuselage recovered from the wreckage.

In like manner, there are theories about the eventual fate of the passengers on flight 93, which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. There is numerous evidence, from “black box” recordings, radio communications and mobile ‘phone conversations indicating that the plane fell to the ground whilst passengers were attempting to overpower the hijackers. However, some persist in believing that the flight was taken over by CIA operatives who landed safely and then abducted or murdered all their fellow travellers. And some say that a missile hit the Pentagon, not an aeroplane, despite numerous eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

Now, it’s true that global warming scepticism uses its fair share of “zombie” arguments as well – not least that granddaddy of them all “scientists predicted global cooling in the 1970s.” Many of these canards have been repeatedly debunked on the Internet, but are then wheeled out again by sceptics in different forums – for example, Ian Plimer has claimed on several occasions that volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans, despite being corrected again and again. He has also repeatedly stated that the US Geological Survey figures that contradict his argument don’t include submarine volcanoes, even though he has been put right on this more than once.

However, I’m going to look here not at the tactics used by sceptics in general, but rather the subset of them that seriously believe that global warming is an elaborate “hoax.” The recent hack of e-mails at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia has of course provided grist to this particular mill. The claim is that the vast majority of climate scientists, nearly all governments around the world, and various combinations of George Soros/ Al Gore/ Arnold Schwarzenegger/ Prince Charles and George Monbiot (please delete as appropriate) are involved in a gigantic conspiracy to falsify temperature records to show that the earth is warming when it isn’t, and/ or to spuriously allege that CO2 is responsible. This conspiracy is generally held to have the following objectives:

(1) To gain additional research funding for climate science (presumably to personally enrich those involved)
(2) To provide a pretext for governments to increase taxes
(3) To establish some form of “world government” (generally held to be a bad thing), or “eco-fascist dictatorship,” and/ or to transfer money to the developing world (for reasons that are not ostensibly clear)
(4) To make money from carbon trading

This has a number of points in common with the ideas of 9/11 conspiracy wonks. To make either of these theories work, the number of participants has to be genuinely vast. Let’s be clear: the main difference between this stuff and the idea that Elvis is alive is that the latter is considerably more plausible. You can imagine that if Elvis had wanted to stage his own death, he would have needed the help of perhaps a couple of dozen people or less – immediate family, undertakers, doctors and so on, who could have been handsomely paid off. That these same people would have kept quiet for years about it is just about plausible. That doesn’t, of course, mean that there is the slightest shred of evidence that such a thing occurred, merely that it’s just about at the far end of possibility that it could have.

On the other hand, the kind of conspiracy needed to explain 9/11 or global warming theory would be on a truly monumental scale. Imagine the number of operatives required to arrange three aircraft collisions, to fake the crash of another one, to rig up an entire building with explosives without anyone noticing anything odd, to position those explosives perfectly so as to mimic the effect on the building of the upper floors collapsing, &c, &c. Dozens, and possibly hundreds of people would need to have been involved – all of whom would have had to keep quiet for years, without spilling the beans. Numerous eyewitness accounts would also have had to be faked.

Likewise, in the case of global warming, the “conspiracy” – and remember, according to these people, “fraud” is what we are talking about – would have to involve hundreds of scientists across a dozen or more scientific fields. Many thousands of data points would have had to be manufactured, and all to be broadly consistent with each other. For example, the computer code and raw data for GISTEMP, one of the most important global temperature series, is published on the Internet and you can bet that the sceptics will have combed every last data point for evidence of “manipulation.” That they have found nothing surely means that the “fraud” would have to relate to the weather station data itself from countries around the world – involving yet more people in the “conspiracy.”

One of the commonly advanced arguments to support this kind of nonsense is that scientists would lose research grants if climate change were shown not to be a threat. Now, it is perfectly true that it might be in the collective self-interest of scientists to claim that there’s a problem when there isn’t; but that doesn’t mean it’s in their individual self-interest. Anyone who came up with compelling evidence genuinely undermining the whole case for anthropogenic global warming would become world famous, would almost certainly become individually very wealthy and would (entirely deservedly) be in line for a Nobel prize. So it seems remarkable that of such a large number of climate scientists, not one of them would be prepared to squeak. Perhaps we can only assume that the mafia are involved too! That’s quite apart from the alleged involvement of world governments, who after the financial crisis surely have enough to do without inventing spurious “crises” to tackle and in doing so making themselves even more unpopular with their own electorates.

So one sees that one of the Achilles heels of both arguments is the sheer number of people who would have to be involved in either case, along with a somewhat convoluted and only superficially plausible set of motives. That hundreds of people could be kept quiet for eight years (in the case of 9/11) or twenty to thirty years (in the case of global warming) is quite incredible – no blabbing, no stories in the press, not even any deathbed confessions.

One other similarity is that the objectors to both global warming and the accepted story of 9/11 are a fairly disparate bunch, who lack any convincing alternative narrative but simply pick away at points, sometimes of a minor and relatively tangential nature, in the “official version.” Very often, the arguments and positions of some of the objectors contradict each other – for example, there are two schools of thought on the 9/11 attacks. Some claim that the whole thing was organized and planned by the CIA, others that it was the work of Al-Qaeda but that the CIA knew about it in advance and deliberately allowed it to happen.

Likewise, the views of global warming contrarians vary, often seamlessly, between the following arguments:
(1) Global warming isn’t happening at all
(2) Global warming is happening, but human activity is not the cause
(3) Global warming is happening and is caused by humans, but the effects will be beneficial, as increased CO2 will lead to greater plant growth
(4) If all else fails, ignore the main arguments and focus on tangential matters (such as the “hockey stick” – the graph that shows that late 20th Century temperatures are the warmest in over 100,000 years. Even if, as sceptics claim, it was warmer in mediaeval times, this doesn’t per se contradict the notion that CO2 is causing warming).
(5) Failing all of (1) to (4), ignore the issue and instead focus on straw man/ personal attacks of peripheral relevance (e.g. Al Gore is a hypocrite)

Finally, there are a couple more things that these theories have in common. One is that, in both cases, the “conspiracy” nonsense did not begin to circulate until some time long after the event. In the case of 9/11, most of the esoteric facts scarcely came to light until some years after the fall of the twin towers; meanwhile, global warming conspiracy theory is also a relatively recent phenomenon. The original idea of the “greenhouse effect” (something of a misnomer, by the way, since the mechanism that warms a greenhouse is actually rather different) was first propounded in outline by Joseph Fourier in the 1830s. John Tyndall in the 1850s showed the heat-trapping properties of CO2 and water vapour. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 made a first attempt at calculating the likely effects of increasing CO2 concentration on temperature, though his first attempt assumed a somewhat higher climate sensitivity for CO2 than would generally be accepted today. Guy Callendar did much additional work on the theory in the 1930s (the effect of greenhouse gases is officially known as the “Callendar effect” in scientific circles) and his work has been built on from the 1950s to the present day. Contrary to the impression promulgated by some sceptics, in the 1970s a large majority of peer-reviewed scientific papers (though not a consensus) suggested that further warming was likely. Yet only in the past few years has anyone been heard to seriously opine that the whole thing (going back how far, exactly) is a “fraud.”

Finally, one has to note that in both cases, there seems to be a small lunatic fringe of conspiracists who will intimidate people they believe (no doubt genuinely) to be part of the “evil empire.” Some eyewitnesses to the events of 9/11 whose testimony contradicts the alternative accounts have received threatening ‘phone calls – and so have some climate scientists, especially since “Climategate.” But there is one fact that runs through all of this – the conspiracy theorists are a diverse, disorganized and disparate group with no alternatives to offer, who are united by nothing other than a desperate desire for their own preconceived opinions to be shown to be true. It’s a lesson that, whatever walk of life we find ourselves in, we should always be willing to reflect on our own motivations and beliefs, and check that we’re not bending the facts to accommodate the self-image we wish to create for ourselves.

And of course, with Britain in the grip of its coldest winter since 1981, we’ve also had the old favourite “global warming isn’t happening because there’s snow outside my window” arguments. In that case, could I advise people to take a winter break in Africa, South America, Canada or the eastern seaboard of the US, southern Europe, Australia or South Asia, all of which experienced unusually warm weather in December.

Anyway, enough for now – time to go out and clear some of the snow on the path outside the house…