Revealing a climate scientist who believed in a new ice age, and why, despite the fact that he went on to become one of the most celebrated cheerleaders for global warming.
ANYONE TEMPTED to believe the hysterical warnings of imminent environmental collapse put out by Ed Miliband MP or Gillian Martin MSP would do well to read this book: The Genesis Strategy: Climate and Global Survival. It was published in 1976 and written by Stephen Schneider (1945-2010). He was the man who cooperated with Al Gore to produce the film which won Gore the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 (shared with the International Panel on Climate Change, which Schneider represented). The film was called “An Inconvenient Truth” and the marketing line was “The most terrifying film you will ever see.” That was the catch. Fear is the hook.
Schneider had form in this respect. In 1989 he made a statement which could be construed as having advocated the exaggeration of threats to the environment which scientists perceived but which the lay public did not. In March 1996 the newsletter of the American Physical Society, APS News, carried an article in which Schneider was so construed. He reacted with righteous indignation in a rebuttal that was long on indignation but short on righteousness—except for one fact. The author of the article accusing him of exaggeration had made up this: “Scientists should consider stretching the truth.”
Schneider was right, he had been misquoted, but he harped on about this to the point where he managed to conceal the other critical fact, which was that, in effect, he had actually said that, just not in so many words. This is what he really wrote: “We [campaigning scientists] need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.” (You can read the accusing article on p. 12 here and the rebuttal on p. 5 here.)
I quote his little spat as it seems to me to encapsulate the entire “environmental crisis” tale. It is a crisis of truth, not of increasing CO2 levels, cow farts or even the eye-aching colour of some of Ed Miliband’s suits. Those who wish us to think that the climate is warming so fast that we must hand power to people like Miliband or Martin have got into the lazy, dishonest habit of trying to “convince” us by using fear.
In that sense, Schneider was ahead of the curve. In the 1980s and ’90s, he successfully coached Al Gore to “make ’em shiver”, as Alfred Hitchcock might have put it. Gore deployed “the great Pacific garbage patch”, the near extinction of the polar bear, the imminent immersion of Florida or Bangladesh due to rising sea levels. These fictions were designed to terrify the gullible public. Fear was the key. Why?
Elementary, my dear Watson. The most reliable way to get people’s attention is to tell them you have bad news which will directly affect them—like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. The natural, and indeed healthy, reaction is to listen carefully and to try to take avoiding action. If the threat is something which you cannot see and/or do not have the power to do anything about, like rising global CO2 levels, the equally natural and healthy reaction is to cede power to those who you presume are in a position to understand the threat and avert it. Once again, fear is the stairway to power over the masses.
Every English schoolboy knows that Hitler rode to power on popular fear of the Jews, and Stalin on fear of capitalists. But Roosevelt was right, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Somehow, since FDR made that point in his first inauguration speech ninety years ago, we have lost the message. It applies as much to the confected climate “crisis” today as it did to the economy of Depression-era America then. Yet we have still to evolve a protective scepticism about the fear mongers. It is high time we did.
A good place to start is Schneider’s book. It was published when Gerald Ford was still President, and it shows how scientists who want to make a name for themselves used to try to frighten people before the arrival of the internet. Before the climate, there was over-population. Writing in the mid-1970s, Schneider focussed on predictions that the world population of the time, which was 4 billion, might grow to as much as 20 billion within half a century or so—i.e. now, when it is in fact about 8 billion.
Schneider was aware that his friend, Paul Ehrlich—much quoted in this book—had published The Population Bomb to widespread acclaim in 1968. The Prologue started with these words: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death… nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Schneider got the secondary message. To an ambitious academic, fungible fear is pay dirt. If you want to get on network television you have to shock uncheckably. The future is, by definition, uncheckable—until it becomes the past, by which time most people have lost interest. That is the reason to re-visit books like Schneider’s.
My reading of his career is that he was a scientist in search of a terror which he could use to make himself as famous as Ehrlich. But the population issue went off the boil, partly because hundreds of millions of people did not die of famine in the 1970s. So, sometime in the 1980s, Schneider recalibrated his warnings and hitched his wagon to the star of carbon dioxide. That brought in Senator Al Gore, soon to be Vice-President, and the road to Oslo was open.
But that is another story. Before that, in 1976, the most promising-looking general-application terror was over-population. Ehrlich had made the point, now Schneider thought he could sell a text on what to do about it. That is the subject of this book.
His answer is what he calls the “Genesis Strategy”. That is a reference to the Book of Genesis, chapter 41, in which Joseph offers a survival strategy to the Pharaohs, based on the idea of a predictable cycle in which Egypt experienced seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. What the country needed was regulation and food reserves. Schneider quotes verse 29: “Now therefore let Pharaoh look out to a man discrete and wise and set him over the land of Egypt.” (p. 39)
Though Schneider does not say it at this point, the reader already suspects that the author would like some universal authority to be “set over” the world in order to regulate its behaviour. Certainly, the issue of world government features strongly in this book, especially with regard to over-population.
To take the African Continent as an example: when Ehrlich published, the population was under 350 million. By 1976, when Schneider published, it had risen to 430 million. Today, it is 1.5 billion, an increase of more than 300% in less than sixty years. Is that “sustainable”? If not, how do we restrain growth without mass famines?
Not even a modern Pharaoh could regulate the sex life of everyone from the Cape to Cairo. But that is the whole point. To kill humanity’s freedom to reproduce is just as hard as it is to kill its irresponsible desire to keep warm, for example by toasting its toes beside wood-burning fires in snowed-in Highland cottages or freezing Borders farmhouses.
To hedge his bets, Schneider included some other likely-looking threats, such as economic growth, nuclear terrorism and bureaucratic bloat. Really, any crisis would serve his purpose of creating the need for wise overlords to restrain the follies of national governments which are “motivated primarily by generally narrow short-term self-interest.” (p. 102) Schneider concludes: “Nothing short of a massive and immediate full-scale attack on the world predicament is likely to avert potential disasters; the requisite scale of effort calls for a worldwide plan, a Global Survival Compromise.” (p. 312)
The reason for this is that “All nations must work urgently to create a stable-equilibrium world with adequate food supply and manageable demand.” (p. 58) That is essentially what the Pharaoh said, following the verses Schneider quoted. “And Pharaoh said unto his servants, Can we find such an one as this… and Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shown thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as thou art.”
Verse 40 is the kicker: “Thou shallt be over my house , and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than thou.” So Joseph/Schneider gets the job of being a sort of Prime Minister under a constitutional Pharaoh. Nothing could be nicer!
The only problem was that Joseph/Schneider was talking through his yarmulka. In The Genesis Strategy, the main danger to the global food supplies is a new ice age. Schneider devotes many pages to arguing that we should be seeding the whole of the Arctic ice sheet with black soot so that it does not waste so much heat by reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere. Warming the planet is an urgent necessity. He calculates that 50,000 Boeing 747 sorties would be needed to “dump the 10 million metric tons of soot necessary to cover 10 million square kilometres of icecap to a depth of one ten thousandth of a centimetre.” (p. 19-20)
The basis of Schneider’s argument is that the earth has cooled since 1945 (p. 136) and that a new ice age could develop very quickly, perhaps within less than a century (p. 66). Were he right, we’d be half-way there now. This discreet and wise expert also advocated cloud-seeding to improve weather for agriculture and perhaps to divert hurricanes. The technology, Schneider says, has already been proven: “I am referring to the United States’ use of cloud-seeding in the 1960s in an effort to transform the Ho Chi Min Trail in Vietnam into a sea of mud.” (p. 211)
I don’t suppose Miliband or Martin have read this book, or ever will. If so, they will miss the one eye-catching point on which Schneider is undoubtedly right—on consensus.
We hear endless noise from the empty vessels in public life about the necessity to listen to the “scientific consensus”. It is thought to reveal a lack of house spirit if you object by pointing out the obvious logical flaw, which is that we do not live in the “stable equilibrium” world Schneider envisaged so that constant adaptation and experiment is essential for survival. All that depends on individual insight. Without it, we are sheep—or Soviets. Consensus dominance is the graveyard of individual experiment and creativity, and therefore of intelligent adaptation. I’m with Schneider on this one: “My own feeling is that ‘consensus’ is an inadequate way to do science.” (p. 10, emphasis added)
A global consensus among scientists today, half a century after Schneider wrote, would hold that it is global heating rather than global cooling which is going to destroy civilisation unless we do what the wise Josephs of the Global Survival Compromise want. But fashions in fear exploitation come and go, like Milibands and Martins in government. It might be phone addiction which kills the human race, or nuclear war. The best we can do is for each one of us to think clearly about what we know and what we don’t know, and see the Milibands and Martins for what they are. The principles of real science do not change. Consensus is still an inadequate way to confront the future.
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Post-apocalyptic image of ruins of frozen modern city by unicusx from Adobe Stock
