The climate change cult now owes more to religion than rationality

A fundamental failure to understand the essence and purpose of science risks dire consequences

Everybody seems to accept, after recent events, that scientific advice can lead to disastrous government policy. It is now widely believed that misjudgements on the part of official scientific advisers led to the wrong decisions being made in the early stages of the pandemic. Dutifully following what ministers insisted on calling The Science was, it turns out, not such a great idea after all.

Before this incident slips away into the annals of historic political scandals, we should ask what precisely went wrong – because the governments of the world are currently facing another set of far-reaching decisions prompted by scientific advice, which involve even greater potential for catastrophe.

That particular scientists, at a particular moment, made a mistaken strategic calculation in an unprecedented health crisis is not shocking, or even terribly surprising. It does not dishonour those individuals whose advice they sincerely believed to be well-founded. Nor does it discredit the authority of science itself. What happened – and could possibly be about to happen again – arose from a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is, and the degree to which its findings can be regarded as inviolable.

The clue is in the way that government ministers described the scientific opinion to which they were adhering so assiduously. Matt Hancock in one memorable moment actually said that “with science on our side” we would inevitably defeat Covid. What was notable about this fatuous statement was not just the idea that “science” (as opposed to individual scientists) can ever be on anybody’s side, but its startling resemblance to a testament of religious belief.

Just replace the word “science” in that phrase with the word “God”. Our trust in the omnipotence and benevolent protection of scientific authority was put beyond doubt or criticism. “Science” (always referred to as one indivisible thing) was the fount of all certainty, and therefore to raise objections to its pronouncements was irresponsible and, by implication, wicked. Only with hindsight, as the Prime Minister is often heard to say, can we see the mistaken calculations that were made and the consequences that arose from them.

But the essential mistake was made by ministers who treated science as if it were revealed truth rather than what it actually is: a mode of inquiry that relies on endless questioning, competing theories, exhaustive argument, the examination of contradictory evidence, and, above all, the toleration of disagreement, in order to progress. (To the extent that the scientific advisers were complicit in the Government’s naive view of their disciplines, they must be seen as culpable.)

All of this is critical to the way that the issue of climate change is being treated by governments and global institutions. The discourse around the danger that it represents and what should be done about it is now dominated by language, which can only be described as apocalyptic in the true Biblical sense of the word.

Let me say from the start that I am not qualified to make scientific judgements about the empirical facts of this matter. (Nor, of course, are some of the prominent exponents of the most extreme version of the climate campaign: Greta Thunberg does not have a degree in any scientific subject and famously withdrew from formal education to pursue her public mission.) It is perfectly possible, so far as I know, that the most cataclysmic predictions and the inevitability of the worst prognoses are objectively correct.

And yet there is something about this movement that is so suspiciously imitative of an extreme religious cult that it is very hard to see how it could be compatible with the spirit of scientific endeavour. Climate campaigning, at least in its most wellpublicised form, embodies everything that one would expect to see in a movement of fanatical fundamentalist fervour: the concept of original sin (industrialisation) that requires an acceptance of universal guilt, which can only be expiated through selfdenial and penance (sacrificing personal prosperity and freedoms).

The political establishments of the grown-up developed world are now promulgating accusations and vengeful warnings delivered by child saints of the terrible world-destroying punishments to come if their cries of woe are not heeded. All of this is somehow incongruous: a bizarre melding of modern media and the Middle Ages.

There is something absurdly childlike and unscientific about the anthropomorphising of the planet, which is inevitably referred to as if it were a sentient being, a loving parent (Mother Earth?) that is in danger of being destroyed by our ungrateful, selfish behaviour – even though the spread of industrial progress and mass prosperity around the world could be seen as the opposite of selfishness.

Alongside this beatification of the planet as a living presence that must be protected from our rapaciousness, goes an absurdly sentimental picture of nature. The natural world is now routinely depicted as a realm of infinite peaceful coexistence and benign diversity whose denizens are threatened only by the cruel exploitation of human activity. As anyone who has learnt anything about the brutal imperatives of evolution will know, the natural world is more of a Hobbesian war of all against all for survival than a Garden of Eden.

Of course human beings have been – and still are – guilty of horrific predations but such activity is coming under ever greater surveillance and control by the conscientious forces that only human beings can muster. And the husbandry of the natural world by organised society has certainly helped to protect life forms that would otherwise have been lost in the ruthless natural struggle for dominance.

More than anything, it is this presumption that humanity must be the source of all evil that makes the climate campaign seem so bizarrely unscientific. It is a moral crusade with echoes of an age of unreason – when modern science, from Galileo onwards, has seen itself as the essence of rational thinking and the opponent of dogmatism. Perhaps the decline of proper religious belief, which offered at least a possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation with past error, left a vacuum that could only be filled by self-loathing.

Alongside this beatification of the planet as a living presence, goes an absurdly sentimental picture of nature