Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? I believe so.
I do think we are experiencing panic. While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.
I will look at two disastrous periods that have some resemblance to today’s craze: witchcraft fears in the Middle Ages and the eugenics movement of the 1930s. I am not alone in making these comparisons to climate change alarm , as you will see. [1]
But first, bear with me as I report on some of the efforts to ignore or squelch criticism of the prevailing apocalyptic approach. These efforts are inappropriate, even unethical. Then I will discuss the two previous outsized eras.
How Prominent Climate Alarmists Treat Prominent Scientists
Here are a few actions regarding scientists that trouble me.
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- The International Monetary Fund has just canceled (or “postponed”) a speech by 2022 Nobel-winning physicist John Clauser because he recently stated that climate change is not a crisis.
- A peer-reviewed article in the European Physical Journal Plus is being retracted because news media quoted scientists who didn’t like the findings—but they were unwilling to write a rebuttal.
- Prominent, much-honored scientists have been disparaged and slighted for their views. I have a list of those scientists. One example of the treatment: American Scientist, the journal of the scientific honor society Sigma Xi, refused to publish a well-known scientist’s article unless he found a coauthor who differed with him on global warming!
As for the media, you hear constantly about today’s heat waves—which are severe—but did you know that the U.S. in the 1930s was hotter than today? And a recent study in Global Environmental Change found that there were 51,230 peer-reviewed papers on climate change in 2020 and the media reported on just 9 percent, most from just six journals. Their choices mostly cover “a narrow and limited facet of climate change knowledge.” [2]
And it is obvious that politicians and businesses are on a bandwagon. Subsidies push wind and solar power and electric cars, while regulations prevent future oil and gas drilling and mining (even of minerals needed for electric batteries).
Witches and “Haile, Tempests, and Hurtfull Weather”
The persecution, torture, and execution (some by fire) of witches in Europe began long before the Salem witch trials in the United States, as early as 1445 according to one source. In 1589, a series of nasty storms prevented Anne of Denmark, the young bride of Scotland’s King James VI, from reaching Edinburgh for months. Writes Megan Hamilton in the History Collection, James “believed witches conjured the fierce weather to keep his young Queen from attaining her throne.” His views spurred a round of persecutions known as the North Berwick Witch Trials, which led to 150 accusations, torture, and 25 deaths.[3]
This was the Little Ice Age, the period between 1300 and 1850, when weather often wiped out crops, caused shipwrecks, and made life miserable for people who lacked adequate shelter. [4] In an article in Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says:
“In his 1584 book, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, an English MP and author, outlined the common view of witches as climate changers. Many believe witches can ‘raise haile, tempests, and hurtfull weather’, he said, as well as being able to ‘inhibit the sunne, and staie both daye and night, changing the one into the other’. . . .” [5]
Belief that witches were changing the climate (and doing other awful things) was not entirely irrational. Some people claimed to be witches and earned their living from witchcraft. As Hamilton describes them,
“Most were elderly, having survived their husbands, and with no means of financial support. For them, the idea of practicing witchcraft was an attractive idea, and many claimed they had weather-changing abilities, especially in regards to stopping hailstorms. Farmers, ever hopeful that their talents might protect crops began paying these frail, elderly women who lived in run-down houses at the edges of forests.”
But their magic could turn on them, and did. As David Bessan wrote in Scientific American, “Frequent storms, long winters and cold summers caused famine and starvation and so the demoralized peasants, demanding for fast actions, forced the authorities to prosecute the supposed culprits.”
Michael Crichton Compares Eugenics and Climate Change
Let us move to a different era and a different theory, one that permeated the early twentieth century and was supported by such luminaries as Supreme Court justices Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes; Margaret Sanger; Alexander Graham Bell, George Bernard Shaw; H. G. Wells; and many, many others.
While climate change per se has nothing to do with eugenics, there may be similarities in the behavior of the public and leadership.
In a historical addendum to his 2004 novel State of Fear, Michael Crichton wrote: “The theory was eugenics, and its history so dreadful—and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing—that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.” [7] He wrote this appendix to compare the eugenics movement to the extreme climate change alarmists he featured in his novel.
Eugenics was essentially a program to improve the quality and intelligence of Americans by preventing deterioration of the gene pool. While there is a connection between intelligence and inheritance, eugenics advocates went far beyond that. Emeritus MIT scientist Richard Lindzen wrote in 1996:
“Briefly, segments of the biology community studying human heredity began, in the early part of this century, to consider the possibility that ‘feeble-mindedness’ might be a simple Mendelian genetic characteristic characterized by a single recessive gene. The eugenics movement seized on this as the basis for a variety of practical actions including forced sterilization.”[8]
As Lindzen indicates, this theory—which many scientists soon realized was too simplistic—did not remain in the Ivory Tower. (The State of North Carolina conducted forced sterilizations until the 1970s.) Few of the scientists who realized the complexity spoke out. Improving the quality of future generations become a moral crusade.
These ideas became entangled with growing American concern about “rising hordes” of immigrants, especially from southern and eastern Europe. So-called intelligence tests administered in connection with World War I identified widespread lack of intelligence. While the entire country scored badly on these tests, the talk about eugenics tended to focus on immigrants.
“When immigration came to the fore of the political agenda,” writes Lindzen, “the eugenics movement was ready to provide the ‘scientific’ foundation.” Lindzen quotes a prominent economist, Irving Fisher, who said enthusiastically in 1912, “The stresses of immigration alone provided a golden opportunity to get people in general to talk eugenics.”
The only thing that stopped the movement was the horrific steps taken in Germany before and during the Second World War. (The Rockefeller Foundation was funding research in Germany as late as 1939, says Crichton.)
Then, a curtain of silence fell. “After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist,” writes Crichton. “Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all.”
In the future, will advocates for fighting climate change at all costs be proud of their roles? I welcome comment.
“Witches’ Sabbath” above is a public domain image of a work by Michael Herr published in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1626. Available through Wikimedia Commons.
[Comments follow Notes.]
Notes
[1] The title, of course, comes from Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Richard Bentley, 1841). However, no factual information in this article comes from that source.
[2] Marie-Elodie Perga, Oriane Sarrasin, Julia Steinberger, Stuart N. Lane , and , Fabrizio Butera,”The Climate Change Research That Makes the Front Page: Is It Fit to Engage Societal Action?” Global Environmental Change 80 (May 2023), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378023000419?via%3Dihub.
[3] Megan Hamilton, “How Climate Change Spurred Witch Hunts In Medieval Europe Before The Age of Enlightenment,” History Collection, https://historycollection.com/how-climate-change-spurred-witch-hunts-in-medieval-europe-before-the-age-of-enlightenment/.
[4] Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
[5] Brendan O’Neill, “The Climate Witch Trials,” Spiked (July 22, 2023), https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/.
[6] David Bessan, “Medieval Witch Hunts Influenced by Climate Change,” Scientific American (Nov. 3, 2014), https://historycollection.com/how-climate-change-spurred-witch-hunts-in-medieval-europe-before-the-age-of-enlightenment/.
[7] Michael Crichton, “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous,” First Appendix, State of Fear (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). Available online at: https://mennodeboer.com/2021/06/14/michael-crichton-why-politicized-science-is-dangerous/.
[8] Richard S. Lindzen, “Science and Politics: Global Warming and Eugenics,” in Risks, Costs, and Lives Saved, R. W. Hahn, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Sorry to say, I don’t see the point of your essay. You acknowledge that our climate change is real, and that human activity has contributed to it. However, you skirt the question of whether human activity has caused or exacerbated climate change and, most significantly, whether there is any threat to human societies.
By your choice of analogies, I infer that you view climate change as completely harmless and the threat entirely imaginary — equivalent to witchcraft and variations in intelligence among populations. By extension, all reactions to these phenomena are hysterical.
A better analogy, I think, would be the Red Scare in the U.S. The U.S. Communist Party did pose a danger – how much of a danger is debatable, but I personally believe it was dangerous. The reaction to this, I think we could agree, was hysterical and harmed many innocent people. Nuance was not recognized. Let’s not go down this path – on either side of the debate.
Elizabeth, I should note that neither threats—witch hexes or eugenicists’ emphasis on inheritance—were imaginary. Some old women in Europe claimed to be witches so that they could obtain payment from farmers who wanted to be protected from bad crops. And there is a link between inheritance and intelligence, but not (as Professor Lindzen points out) between “feeble-mindedness’” and a “simple Mendelian genetic characteristic characterized by a single recessive gene.”
That is the problem: An ounce of accuracy leads to a pound of harm.
Jane: With respect the academic climate change activists – follow the money. Unlike the witches and eugenics, when it comes to climate we are looking at rent seeking.
David, that’s a good point. Of course, there was some money in eugenics but not on the climate-change scale.
“[T]he eugenics movement of the 1930s.” Two thoughts.
1. Eugenicists differed among themselves and government policies differed between nation-states. E.g., the UK never legislated for sterilization or carried it out.
2. By the 1930s opinion (outside of Nazi Germany) was shifting against eugenics and public policy to promote it.
I think the media and certain government officials contribute to the public ignoring certain facts. The evening news systematically engages in sample selection bias by reporting extraordinary events as if they were typical events (cherry picking). A temperature of 120
degrees gets reported by the news, but many more days of 90 degrees in August do not get reported, because it is considered not newsworthy. Many members of the public interpret these atypical events as if they represent a new average value. This same issue is
being observed now with regard to reports about UFOs. I think this misinterpretation of data is what you have called a “panic”. Tom
I’m not sure global warming fits entirely with the other two examples. It seems to me that the other “hysterias” played into people’s long-held underlying beliefs. Many pagan beliefs persisted in rural areas of Europe even into the 17th centuries, including witchcraft. The witch craze may have been pagan Europe’s last gasp (except for a few vestigial elements like Halloween and once-pagan holidays like Easter), swept away not by Christianity but by the burgeoning scientific revolution that gained ground in the 17th century. And eugenics was, in the minds of many people, a common-sense approach to human procreation akin to how they treated their animals: you put the prize bull—not his puny, deformed brother—in with the cows. It worked at that level, with rather unsophisticated people managing to create new breeds of animals with desirable traits.
But there never were such a set of underlying beliefs about “climate change.” It appears to me to be more of a top-down phenomenon, driven by those who use it as a fear-based vehicle to greater political control—Earth Day on steroids. There were no such wide-spread concerns that climate change was going to end life on Earth until the Cultural Marxists realized that such fears are an efficient way to get people—especially young people—on board with their political and economic agendas. You can accomplish big things when people are fearful of their existence: you can reduce the population by making people think that having children is a selfish and damaging act. And you can expropriate land when farmers fail to comply with onerous regulations arbitrarily imposed for the sake of meeting phony standards (as has been attempted in The Netherlands). The left has been in control of our institutions and hammering away on environmental issues since the early 1960s, so they now have the widespread support—the “madness of crowds”—that was previously nonexistent.
Dear Ms. Stroup:
Thanks for the excellent essay.
I recall the hysteria surrounding the over-population scare. Prof Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University whipped up the hysteria with his two best-sellers “The Population Bomb” and “The Population Explosion” in 1968 and 1990, respectively.
The first book began with the dire claim —
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…”
Regards,
Atanu
It is interesting to compare climate change with witchcraft and eugenics, but don’t we have better data today? For example, Bjorn Lomborg’s WSJ article of August 1, shows that the percentage of the world that burns each year has been declining since 2001, in spite of damaging fires in certain countries.
Tom, we do have better data but even though those facts are published in the Wall Street Journal, they seem to be ignored.