Michael Mann and the Climate Change Fraud

On Friday 23^rd August this year, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia in Vancouver dismissed with prejudice a libel action brought by Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, against retired Canadian climatologist Tim Ball. Despite  receiving almost no attention in the mainstream media, this ruling represents a pivotal development in the climate change debate. For by throwing out Michael Mann’s case, the court effectively vindicated Tim Ball’s claim that the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, published by Mann and two co-authors in 1998 and prominently cited in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001, was a scientific fraud.

To fully appreciate the significance of this, however, one must first understand what the hockey stick graph was intended to achieve. For up until Mann’s publication, it had been generally accepted that our planet’s climate had varied significantly, not just in the distant past when dinosaurs roamed the earth and tropical plants grew in Alaska, but even in the relatively recent history of the last thousand years, which, up until 1998, climatologists had divided into three more or less distinct periods: the Medieval Warm Period, which was believed to have lasted from around 950 CE to around 1250 CE; the Little Ice Age, which was believed to have reached its nadir in the second half of the 17^th century, when the Thames froze over each winter, allowing ‘ice fairs’ to be held on the river outside the Palace of Westminster; and the Modern Warm Period which was believed to have started sometime in the middle of the 19^th century and is thought to be still in progress. In fact, so widely accepted were these three climatological periods that both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were prominently displayed on graphs, both in the presentation given to Congress by James Hansen in 1988 – the event which first brought the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) to the wider public’s attention – and in the IPCC’s First Scientific Assessment published in 1990. 

For proponents of the AGW theory, however, this apparent evidence of a natural variability in the earth’s climate posed a number of serious problems. For if the climate had both warmed and cooled a number of times prior to the industrial revolution, then there had to have been factors other than carbon dioxide at work affecting it. Moreover, this being so, one could legitimately ask whether climate scientists were not therefore obliged, not only to discover what these other factors were, but to investigate whether they were still operative in the climate today and to determine how much they might be contributing to current global warming. As a result, the very existence of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age not only threatened to undermine the central premise of the AGW theory – that it is man-made carbon dioxide, liberated as a result of burning fossil fuels, that is the primary cause of climate change – but actually risked undermining the science of climatology altogether as it is currently structured. For not only is it unable to answer these fundamental questions, but it is largely ill-equipped to do so, many of the answers almost certainly lying outside its current range of competencies. 

The only solution, therefore, was to erase both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the climatological record. And so that is what Michael Mann did. In what he called ‘a new statistical approach to reconstructing global patterns of annual temperature’, he expunged from history any significant variation in the earth’s climate prior to the 19^th century, replacing the graph shown in the lower half of Figure 1 with the new flattened out version in the upper portion, which shows no significant warming of the climate until the 19^th century and which consequently looks a bit like a hockey stick.

Figure 1: Michael Mann's Rewriting of History

So how exactly did he achieve this transformation? Good question! The answer, however, is that nobody knows. For despite numerous requests from other scientists for him to release his data and explain his methodology, for twenty years Michael Mann has resolutely refused to do either, claiming that both the data and the methodology were his intellectual property, even though his research was actually funded by Pennsylvania State University and therefore by the taxpayer.

 

The inevitable result, however, was that speculation on these matters very quickly became rife, with a number of scientists trying to generate the same results using different methods, all of them without success, thereby giving rise to a widespread suspicion that the only way in which Mann could have produced such a uniform data series was by splicing together data from different data sets: a suspicion which will probably make more sense once one remembers that even in a country like Great Britain, with a long scientific tradition, recorded temperatures measured using some kind of thermometer only date back a little over three hundred years, and that the temperatures of earlier periods therefore have to be calculated from what is known as proxy data: tree rings, lake bed sediments, ice core samples and the like. The problem with calculating temperatures in this way, however, is that while it may be relatively easy to detect changes in temperature within a single proxy series – wider tree rings, for instance, indicating better growing seasons and therefore higher temperatures – it can be far more difficult to calibrate these relative changes within a series to the absolute temperatures of a standard metric. Even though different data series based on different proxies and using different methods of calculation may all show the same relative changes in temperature over time, it is quite possible, therefore, for them all to translate into slightly different absolute temperatures. To get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, all Michael Mann had to do, therefore, was use a data set with a relatively low calibration to measure the former and splice it together with a data set with a slightly higher calibration to measure the latter. And this is what many people believe him to have done.

Not, of course, that anyone was particularly keen to call him out on the matter. For even as early as 2001, the climate science community was already becoming grossly intolerant of anyone who questioned the AGW orthodoxy, with dozens of scientists around the world being denied funding for their research and even hounded from their jobs. Prominent names who have suffered in this way over the years include Roger Pielke, who was forced to resign from his position as Professor of Meteorology at the University of Colorado after a publishing a paper in which he statistically demonstrated that extreme weather events had not become more frequent as a result of global warming, and Judith Curry, who was similarly forced to abandon her position at the Georgia Institute of Technology for daring to suggest what everyone had taken for granted before Michael Mann’s rewriting of history: that our endlessly variable climate is almost certainly determined by many more factors other than just the one currently in vogue. 

The result was that it was largely left to retired climatologists such as Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at MIT, to criticise what he was the first to call the increasing ‘alarmism’ in climate science, and another ex-professor, from the University of Winnipeg, Tim Ball, to challenge Michael Mann directly, famously commenting in a recorded interview that he thought ‘Mann should be in the State Pen, not Penn State’.

Rather than simply letting the comment go, however, Mann decided to sue Tim Ball for libel in the Canadian courts: a move which took just about everybody by surprise, not only because resorting to the law was not generally deemed to be an appropriate way of resolving scientific disputes, but because, to anyone who understood how the law functions, it was immediately obvious that, in order uphold his complaint, the Canadian courts would require Mann to disclose precisely what, by then, he had been refusing to disclose for more than ten years: his data and his methodology. In fact, so extraordinary and apparently misjudged was Mann’s action that it is widely suspected that he didn’t actually realise that this would be the case. Once committed, however, he then had no choice but to spend the next eight years trying to avoid the legal consequences of his impetuous bravado, continually promising to produce his data as the court instructed, but then continually finding reasons not to do so, until on 23^rd August 2019, the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of British Columbia finally decided that it had had enough and dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that Michael Mann could not bring the case again, or at least not in Canada.

Not, of course, that he was in any way embarrassed or fazed by this. In fact, he was back on television within a couple of weeks demanding that all American universities declare a ‘climate emergency’. Nor has it affected the widespread consensus on climate change, either in the media or in the minds of the public at large, not least because, with the entire court case having largely gone unreported, very few people know about it. Thus while you and I and few dozen others may feel justified in regarding Mann’s refusal to disclose his data as a tacit admission of his guilt, for the IPCC, most world governments and the mainstream media, both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age continue to have never existed, leaving carbon dioxide as the sole factor affecting climate.

While others may shake their heads in bewilderment and frustration at the seeming impossibility of ever being able to get a politically blinkered establishment to change its mind on this issue, however, my own primary interest is rather in how this state of affairs could have come about. How did it happen? And why? Why did Michael Mann decide to commit scientific fraud rather than simply follow the evidence wherever it took him? After all, that’s what scientists are supposed to do, isn’t it? Especially in a field as young as climatology, with so many unanswered questions and so much still to be discovered.

I say this because a couple of years ago I had the good fortune to stumble upon a lecture – which you can find here – given by Carl-Otto Weiss, a retired professor of physics at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Germany, who, along with a couple of other retired colleagues, came up with the novel idea of subjecting climate data to spectral analysis. 

For those not acquainted with this particular mathematical technique, spectral analysis is what is used to isolate electromagnetic signals of different frequencies from a background of ‘white noise’. However, it can also be used to reveal recurring or cyclical patterns of different periodicities in large data sets: patterns which may otherwise be lost due the fact that, being of different lengths, their effects will sometimes reinforce each other while, at other times, cancel each other out, giving rise to a combined data series in which no overall pattern may be discernible.

Now, of course, a data series with no discernible pattern may be just that: a data series in which the changes to the values are the result of purely random influences with no underlying pattern to them at all. Applying spectral analysis to climate data, therefore, could easily have turned out to have been a total waste of time and effort. Moreover, Professor Weiss and his colleagues had no way of knowing that this was not the case when they first started out. What is quite remarkable, therefore, is not only that it actually worked, but that, by using this technique, they were able to separate out no less than nine distinct cyclical patterns in the data, each one representing a different factor affecting climate, with different periodicities ranging from under twenty years to over two hundred years and with varying effects upon temperature. 

They also made one other extremely important discovery. This was that there were no non-cyclical patterns in the data: no linear or exponential progressions of the kind one would have expected them to have found if a progressive increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide were one of the factors affecting the climate. This, in itself, therefore, would appear to falsify the AGW theory. Even more significantly, however – from the point of view of this new fledgling science of climatology – of the nine different patterns they did find in the data, they were only able to positively correlate the two strongest or most dominant with factors already believed to contribute to overall climate variability.

The first of these was the 65 year oceanic cycle – which includes both the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) – during which ocean temperatures vary by between 0.3°C and 0.5°C above and below the mean, spending around 30 to 35 years warming and then 30 to 35 years cooling down again.

The second was a cycle which has long been associated with changes in the climate but which, on the face of it, would appear to have very little possible connection. This is the 230 to 250 year Grand Solar Cycle, so called in order to distinguish it from the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, during which the sun’s magnetic poles invert, the north pole becoming the south and vice versa, a process which is both regular and continuous and which also produces fluctuations in the strength of the sun’s overall magnetic field. And it is these fluctuations which provide us with our first clue as to how solar cycles in general might possibly affect climate. For just as the earth’s magnetic field protects us from some of the more harmful effects of solar radiation, so the sun’s magnetic field protects us from radiation coming from outside of the solar system – usually referred to as cosmic radiation – which primarily consists of free neutrons thrown out into space by exploding stars.

These have a number of effects on our atmosphere. Colliding with nitrogen atoms, for instance, they strip the nitrogen nuclei of protons, thereby turning nitrogen (atomic number 7) into carbon (atomic number 6). They also break oxygen atoms (atomic number 8) in half, creating beryllium (atomic number 4). With regard to the issue at hand, however, their most significant effect is that they also ionise the atmosphere and act a catalyst for turning water vapour into water droplets, which then form into clouds. The weaker the sun’s magnetic field, therefore, the greater the cloud formation on earth, and the greater the consequent albedo effect – the reflection of the sun’s energy back into space – resulting in a cooling of the climate.

In the case of the ordinary 11 year solar cycle, this effect is, of course, very small. In fact, in the current political climate, its existence at all will be categorically denied. According to a new theory  developed by a team of astrophysicists led by Professor Valentina Zharkova at the University of Northumbria, however, these fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field, and their consequent effect upon the earth’s climate, are not only replicated in grand solar cycles but are actually amplified by them, the magnetic field first becoming stronger and then weaker again in each of the successive 11 year solar cycles of which the grand solar cycle is comprised, until in the last three to five cycles, the sun enters a stable but significantly weakened magnetic state known as a Grand Solar Minimum, the most obvious manifestation of which is an almost total absence of sun spot activity.

Indeed, it is this lack of sun spots, which otherwise occur as a regular and wholly predictable effect of the sun’s turbulent polar inversions, that has allowed solar astronomers to record grand solar minima for more than four centuries, the most famous example of which being the Maunder Minimum – named after solar astronomers Edward and Annie Maunder – which occurred during the second half of the 17^th century, in the middle of what was previously known as the Little Ice Age… until, of course, Michael Mann wrote it out of existence.

Given the absolutely fascinating nature of the science which could potentially explain this once universally accepted period of global cooling, again we have to ask, therefore, why he should have done this, especially as by simply following the science, vast vistas of opportunity would seem to be on offer. 

I say this because it hardly requires a huge amount of imagination to see that one could quite easily build a whole career simply by following the path which Professor Weiss and his colleagues have already laid out: firstly by verifying the results of the group’s spectral analysis, preferably with a larger data set, the Weiss group having only had access to European data; then by identifying and understanding the causal connections between climate variability and however many cyclical factors the spectral analysis ultimately reveals; and finally by bringing them all together in a complex climate model which would hopefully predict future climate change with far more accuracy than currently achieved by models based purely on levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, if I were a young climate scientist today, I’d be champing at the bit to participate in just such a programme of work.

It is at this point, however, that the real problem begins to reveal itself. For not only would such a programme be very expensive, requiring a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing fields as diverse as oceanography and astrophysics, but being of purely academic interest, with no obvious practical application, it is not easy to see who would fund it. For without the public policy interest which the AGW theory engenders, climatology as a separate field of research, independent from either meteorology or geology, would likely be accorded even less priority today than when it was first given impetus during the cold war, when the rival world powers, eager to stake their claim to various parts of Antarctica, had to find something for their ‘scientific research stations’ to do there, and so set them to drilling ice-core samples, thereby opening up the Pandora’s Box of unacceptable truths which has led us, somewhat ironically, into the morass of lies and deceit in which we currently find ourselves.

I say ‘ironically’ because the initial discovery made by all these scientific research stations was, of course, that the so-called ‘ice age’ – in the singular – which, until the 1970s, the earth was thought to have undergone during much of the last one hundred thousand years but which most people believed had finally and completely ended around ten thousand years ago, was merely the latest in a whole series of glaciations and glacial retreats stretching back 2.58 million years, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation

Immediately, there are a number of things you will probably notice about this chart, the first being that it is based on sedimentary data rather than ice core samples. This is because the oldest ice core samples so far extracted – at the Russian Vostok Station in eastern Antarctica – only come from around 3.7km below the surface, which is the equivalent of only going back in time around 800,000 years. Although a truncated graph, covering just this period, would still show a pattern of warming and cooling – which is what was first discovered in the 1970s – it would not therefore show the overall cooling trend that preceded it. And it is to this that I primarily want to draw your attention.

For although it is still almost universally asserted that the Pleistocene Quaternary Glaciation, as this greater ‘ice age’ is now known, came to an end 10,000 years ago, there is absolutely no basis for this assumption in the data as presented, from which it can be clearly seen that the cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat have not only been getting longer over the last 2.58 million years – going from around 41,000 years in duration at the beginning to around 100,00 year in the last dozen or so cycles – but have also been getting considerably colder, the last few cycles reaching up to 9°C below the Vostok mean. Even if this greater ice age has now bottomed out, therefore – and there is no basis for this assumption either – based on this overall trend, the chances are that the earth will still have to go through another 2.58 million years of gradually warming glacial cycles before it gets back to the climate of 2.58 million years ago.

And it was this that naturally made all the headlines back in the mid-1970s when the discovery was first announced: that having just come through what we now know as the Holocene – the brief warm period of around 10,000 years at the top of the current cycle – at some point in the near future – within the next few hundred years or so, perhaps – the earth is almost certain to enter another period of glaciation, the prospect of which seemed all the more imminent during the mid-70s due to the fact that, at that time, before historical temperature data began to be systematically adjusted downwards – something to which I shall return later – the planet appeared to be already cooling, the 1950s, 60s and early 70s having been markedly cooler than the 1930s and 40s. In fact, if one goes back to the unadjusted temperature data from the pre-war period, one finds that the late 1930’s were actually the warmest years of the 20^th century, with the US in particular suffering long, hot summers and a period of intense drought known as the ‘dust bowl’, during which thousands of farmers in the Midwest were driven off their land and forced to embark upon the mass migration to California famously commemorated in John Steinbeck’s novel, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.

With such a devastating drought still very much part of living memory, and the bitterly cold winters of the 1960s and early 70s a simple fact of everyone’s life, the fear which people felt at the prospect of another ‘ice age’, as the newspapers still insisted on calling it, was consequently very real. And yet, still, money for climate research remained in short supply, partly, one suspects, because there simply wasn’t the institutional infrastructure to absorb it, but also because climatologists already had a readily available theory as to why these regular cycles of glaciation and glacial retreat occurred. And it wasn’t what most people wanted to hear.

I say this because although the correlation was by no means exact, these newly discovered large scale cyclic variations in the earth’s climate clearly coincided with the multi-millennial cyclical variations in the earth’s orbit of the sun which had been worked out more than fifty years earlier by the Serbian mathematician and astronomer, Milutin Milankovitch.

The Milankovitch cycles, as they are called, describe three separate aspects of the earth’s solar orbit:

1. The shape of the orbit, itself, which, being acted upon by the gravitational pull of the other planets in the solar system – particularly Jupiter and Saturn – is not constant, being more acutely elliptical at some times than others. Even more significantly, as a further consequence of these gravitational distortions, the sun itself is rarely at the centre of the ellipse, usually being closer to one end – known as the perihelion – than the other – known as the aphelion – with the result that the distance between the earth and the sun varies by up to five million miles.
2. The difference between the length of the sidereal year – the time it takes for the earth to orbit the sun once – and the calendar year, as measured from midwinter solstice to midwinter solstice and caused by the earth’s wobble on its axis. It may not seem much, but the sidereal year is twenty minutes longer than the calendar year, which means that every calendar year it slips back another twenty minutes from its starting point: a phenomenon known as precession. What this also means, therefore, is that the northern hemisphere’s winters occur at different places in the elliptical orbit, sometimes – for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the perihelion, when the winters are consequently quite mild, and sometimes – also for a few thousand years in a row – occurring in the aphelion, when the winters are significantly colder.
3. The variation in the earth’s axial tilt or obliquity, which ranges from 21.1° to 24.5° and means that during some northern hemisphere winters, the earth is actually pointing further away from the sun than in others. If this happens when the winters are occurring in the aphelion, this therefore makes them even colder.

You will, of course, have noted that I speak here specifically of the northern hemisphere. This is because the land in the northern hemisphere is significantly closer to the polar ice cap than it is in the southern hemisphere. Even though the south pole is actually on land, the Antarctic sea ice would have to leap across hundreds of miles of heat-retaining ocean in order to reach South America, South Africa or Australia. For the Arctic sea ice to claim northern Canada, Siberia and northern Scandinavia, in contrast, it wouldn’t have to move very far south at all. Indeed, it already reaches these northern outposts of the three closest continents each and every winter, blocking any Arctic seaway, and would therefore only require a few cold summers, in which it failed to retreat, for a new period of glaciation to begin.

Despite the undisputed soundness of Milankovitch’s astronomical calculations and the clear if only approximate correlation between the earth’s ever changing solar orbit and the cyclical patterns in its multi-millennial climate history, it is not surprising, therefore, that no government in the world was particularly keen on giving scientists money to study this relationship further and thereby provide a more precise date as to when the next period of glaciation would actually begin. For if, as the Milankovitch cycles suggested, the earth’s climate is driven by gravitational forces far beyond the control of any human being, then there was absolutely nothing any government in the world could do about it. Giving people a more accurate forecast as to when an ice sheet a mile thick was going to descend upon North America and Europe would therefore have achieved nothing other than to foster despondency and a total loss of will to do anything constructive. For make no mistake, another period of glaciation like the last one, with a drop in global average temperatures of 9°C, would mean the death of billions of people, if not the whole of human civilization.

In the early 1980s, when governments would have been agonizing over what, if anything, they should do about this problem, it must have seemed like mana from heaven, therefore, when NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), under the directorship of James Hanson, revived a long-abandoned theory, first put forward by the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896, which promised a possible solution. For due to the so-called Greenhouse Gas Effect, Arrhenius had posited that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide which the world had been experiencing ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution, should actually lead to an increase in global temperatures, which Hanson now suggested might be sufficient to counteract the effects of the Milankovitch cycles and hence remove this looming threat.

What Hanson and his colleagues at NASA GISS failed to inform the world, however, is why Arrhenius’ theory had been so long abandoned. Whether or not this was intentional, they entirely neglected to mention the fact that, in 1901, just five years after the theory’s publication, it had been utterly debunked by another Swedish physicist, Knut Ångström, who empirically demonstrated that, due to the limited number of signature wave-lengths at which infra-red radiation is absorbed by carbon dioxide, and the further fact that most of these wave lengths are also absorbed by water vapour, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could not have anywhere near the effect upon climate that Arrhenius had claimed. Using an infrared camera, which Ångström himself had developed, what he discovered, in fact, was that:

1.  at the shorter wavelengths absorbed by carbon dioxide – those which are also absorbed by the thirty times more plentiful water vapour – all of the infra-red radiation re-emitted by the sun-warmed earth is already absorbed by latter, such that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere has no effect on climate whatsoever, while
2. at the longer wavelengths, at which carbon dioxide uniquely absorbs infra-red radiation, the much lower temperatures of the objects from which the radiation is emitted means that the effect is minimal.

Unfortunately, it seems that to governments in the mid-1980s the actual science was not their primary concern. They were happy merely to be assured that they were no longer facing an end-of-the-world catastrophe over which they had no control. As a consequence, they still didn’t really question the science even when they were told that man-made global warming might not merely counteract the effects of the Milankovitch Cycles, but might, in itself, be a threat to the planet. After all, this was something they could control. They could systematically reduce their nations’ carbon dioxide emissions and even gain popularity as a result of their virtuous actions in ‘saving the planet’.

And so the taps were opened and the money flowed, especially in America and the UK, where climate research very quickly became big business. In the UK, for instance, the two largest centres of the science are the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of Exeter, which also houses the UK meteorological office, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which, between them, employ more than three hundred scientists – along with their associated administrative and auxiliary staff – and jointly produce the highly influential HadCRUT dataset, which is used by the IPCC in its scientific assessment reports, and from which an equally influential version of the GAST or Global Average Surface Temperature is derived.

To those unfamiliar with the way in which climate science is currently conducted, this concept of the GAST, and the fact that it needs to be calculated, will probably require some explanation. After all, most people probably imagine that, these days, the earth’s atmospheric temperature is measured from space. As indeed it is. Since 1978, microwave sounding units (MSUs) on polar orbiting satellites, controlled by America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), have measured the intensity of microwave radiation emitted by atmospheric oxygen, from which the temperature of  different layers in the atmosphere can be calculated. Not only are these stratified atmospheric temperatures all significantly cooler than the earth’s surface temperature, however, but, as stated, they only go back to 1978. And as with proxy data, one cannot mix and match datasets. If one wants a longer historical record – one dating back to 1850, for instance, as in the case of the HadCRUT dataset – one therefore has to go back to surface temperature records measured in the old-fashioned way, with a thermometer.

The trouble is, of course, that if one’s objective is to obtain is a global average surface temperature, this enforced methodology, in itself, presents a number of almost insurmountable challenges. The first and most obvious is that weather stations are not evenly distributed about the globe, with far more in Europe and North America than in Africa, Asia and South America, and hardly any at all, in fact, in most of the more inhospitable but climatically critical parts of the world, such as northern Siberia and the Sahara Desert. Just as importantly, this is also reflected historically, with less and less records having been kept outside of Europe and North America the further one goes back in time. In fact, during the first four years of the HadCRUT dataset, from 1850 to 1853, there is only one actual data point in the whole of the southern hemisphere, in Indonesia as it happens.

So how do you calculate a global average surface temperature from such a paucity of actual data? Well it’s a bit like playing a game of Sudoku. Firstly, you divide the world up into a grid of equal sized areas. Then you fill in the average temperatures for those areas for which you have actual data. Then you take two areas for which you have data and extrapolate values for the areas in between. How? Unfortunately this is not made public. For just as in the case of Michael Mann’s data and methodology, the institutions which undertake this work, although publicly funded, claim that their algorithms are proprietary and the primary source of their income, which they therefore have a right to protect.

One can, however, make some educated guesses as to the kind of variables these algorithms would have to include. Take, for example, two areas on the grid – call them A and B – which differ in average temperature by 2°C and which are separated by four dataless areas. The simplest way to extrapolate the average temperatures for these transitional areas would therefore be to divide 2°C by four and assume that the temperature increases by 0.5°C in each of the areas one passes through in moving from the colder area A to the warmer area B. Immediately, however, one can see a number of problems with this. Is the difference in the average temperature between A and B caused by a difference in altitude, for instance? And if so, is the gradient constant? Or is the difference between A and B due to the fact that one is in an urban area while the other is in the countryside, urban areas generally being two or three degrees warmer than rural ones? If so, how far does the urban heat island effect (UHIE) radiate into the countryside? And what happens if one combines these two possibilities? Suppose that both A and B are urban areas at different altitudes, with colder countryside in between. How does one calculate these values?

Not, of course, that this particular example is mathematically very difficult. And I certainly don’t mean to say that the people who work on these problems don’t generally get the answers right or that they are not empirically verified wherever possible. There are, however, areas of the world where the factors affecting the local climate are not only far more complex than in the above example, but where that complexity itself not only produces the kind of inhospitable environment where human habitation and hence weather stations are a rarity, but where it is also that much more difficult to verify their assumed effects.

Take the world’s oceans, for instance, which cover 71% of the planet’s surface and which have such a complex thermodynamic interaction with the atmosphere that even after decades of oceanic-atmospheric studies, meteorologists still find it difficult to predict the development and course of hurricanes with any certainty. What’s more, meteorologists do not have to rely on tethered coastal buoys or ships to feed them surface temperature data in the way that climatologists do.

Then there are the world’s deserts which, due to a lack of water vapour in the atmosphere, experience dramatic drops in temperature when not subjected to direct sunlight. Or the world’s tropical rain forests which, due to their extreme humidity, hardly experience any change in temperature at all whether it be day or night. If you look at maps showing the locations of the worlds weather stations, however, deserts and rain forests hardly figure at all, meaning that whatever changes in temperature these regions of the world experience are nearly all extrapolated from somewhere else: somewhere else that almost certainly does not have these same extreme climatic conditions.

Even more worrying is the fact that, just as in a game of Sudoku, extrapolated data points become data points from which other data points are then extrapolated, such that any error in calculating the value for one particular area can spread and even be amplified across the matrix: a fact which, I suspect, would have scientists in many other fields raising a sceptical eyebrow, especially as we are not allowed to see the algorithms by which these calculated values are generated. Indeed, it’s highly likely that there would be a good many scientists in other disciplines who would not only question the scientific soundness of this whole endeavour but would likely wonder at how it could receive so much public founding while being subject to so little public scrutiny.

Indeed, it is a question which, I suspect, a good many more people will have started asking in the last few months, following the publication of the work of an Australian PhD student called John McLean, whom the guardians of the HadCRUT dataset inexplicably allowed to audit HadCRUT4, the fourth and latest version of their dataset.

Presumably, as a humble PhD student, the senior management at the Hadley Centre and the CRU thought that McLean posed no threat. Unfortunately for them, he found a publisher who was not only willing but eager to publish his findings, which detailed over seventy serious errors in the data.
Admittedly, most of these were just simple mistakes. But even as such, they demonstrate a casualness on behalf of the scientists involved which one would not have expected from people processing such supposedly significant information, especially given that many of the mistakes are so glaring.

By way of a few examples, there are two separate months, for instance, when the measured or calculated average temperature for the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts is recorded as being 0°C. For the whole month of September 1953, to take another example, a town in Romania was supposed to have experienced an average temperature of minus 46°C: the usual average temperature for that month being plus 10°C. Then there is the temperature data recorded by ships at sea, the geographical coordinates of which are logged as being up to two hundred miles inland. In fact, reading this catalogue of glaringly obvious errors, it is almost as if none of the data was ever actually checked or subjected to quality control, which in turn quite naturally leads one to question the quality of the systems and processes by which it is amassed.

Bad as these individual errors are, however, they are as nothing compared to the numerous systematic adjustments to which the data is subjected, especially with respect to the Urban Heat Island Effect, which is largely a 20^th century phenomenon. This is because modern building materials – bricks, concrete and tarmac – are much better at absorbing and storing heat than those which they replaced – stone, wood and cobbles. With the advent of central heating, buildings also started to be heated to much higher levels, and although this coincided with an improvement in insulation, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, all this additional heat always eventually leaks out into the colder surrounding environment, thereby warming it: something which those responsible for weather stations in urban areas, especially at universities and other places of learning, gradually began to recognise as the century progressed.

As a consequence, they therefore slowly began to move these weather stations into more rural areas or any green, open space the school or university happened to own, sports fields being a very popular choice. The result was that average temperatures recorded by these weather stations in the year immediately following their relocation usually and often quite dramatically fell. Instead of assuming that the temperature rise at the previous location had been gradual over a number of years, however, what John McLean discovered was that the compilers of the HadCRUT dataset assumed rather that the older temperatures had always been overstated by the difference recorded in the year of relocation. Instead of adjusting the figures downward on a gradual basis, therefore, they deducted the entire difference from the whole data history of the weather station in question, effectively cooling the past by far more than any reasonable person would regard as warranted.

Nor are the scientists at the Hadley Centre and the CRU alone in this practice. Over the last couple of decades, the same adjustments have been systematically made to the datasets compiled by NASA GISS and the NOAA. Indeed, it is how these institutions, working together, managed to eradicate the warmer years of the 1930s and 40s. Even more importantly, it is also how they have managed to maintain their elevated level of public funding. For in order to keep the money spigots open, the climate science establishment, as a community of institutions, know that they have to keep public concern over climate change at a critical level. For all these institutions, therefore, it is imperative that anything which brings the AGW narrative into question – even the slightest hint that other factors might be involved in climate variability – has to be suppressed.

Shocking as this is, however, the real problem is that the corruption does not stop at the laboratory gates. If it did, it would just be a minor scam. Having embraced the AGW narrative, however, governments around the world have had to make good on their implicit commitment to do something about it, and there have been plenty of other scam artists out there who have been than more than willing to help them: crony capitalists who have no problem accepting public grants and subsidies in return for largely bogus promises of limitless clean energy produced from non-viable technologies which are otherwise so far from being economic that, during their lifetime, they barely recoup the energy expended in their manufacture, installation and maintenance. Worse still, in order to fund these grants and subsidies, both taxes and electricity prices have to be increased for both consumers and businesses alike, thereby suppressing demand in other parts of the economy, while the intermittent nature of the energy produced by wind and solar farms is a constant threat to the stability of any electricity grid which is forced to rely on them, eventually giving rise to power outages which are even more economically damaging.

At the same time, demands that we eliminate the use of fossil fuels for transport have forced an already depressed automotive industry to scrap billions of dollars of cumulative investment in internal combustion technologies while investing even more billions in the development of alternative electric vehicles for which there is currently little to no existing refueling infrastructure and insufficient electricity available to power one even if there were, our generating capacity having already become too degraded by the green energy revolution. And to cap it all, it is now being discovered that, because of their lithium ion batteries, electric cars are not nearly as safe as everyone imagined, having a tendency to suddenly burst into flames should any of their battery casings become compromised, allowing the lithium inside to come into contact with the oxygen in the air and causing them to explode.

But surely, you say, governments employ engineers and economists to advise them on these matters. If the direction in which we are currently headed were as misguided and ill-conceived as I say it is, then surely they would have been told. And you are right, they probably have been. It’s just that no politician hoping to be re-elected could ever repeat any of this advice, let alone base their policies on it, while many of them almost certainly choose to cynically profess a belief in a post-fossil-fuel world in order to appeal to that small but extremely vocal part of the electorate with whom it most resonates: the idealistic but largely directionless graduates of our post-modernist education system for whom the traditional aspirations of getting married, raising a family and owning their own home now seem as anachronistic and ideologically defective as they are economically unattainable. When set beside the yawning chasm of nihilistic emptiness which otherwise beckons, to many of this generation the idea of ‘saving the planet’ has thus become the one thing they can cling to: not just as an indubitably good cause to which they can devote themselves entirely without further need of reason or justification, but as something which, in its very purposefulness, offers them salvation.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the climate change movement has often been compared to a religious cult. For like a religious cult it gives meaning to its followers’ lives. Based on such an abstruse foundation, however – the actual physics of which few of its followers even claim to understand – it also engenders the kind of anxiety which naturally comes with the possibility that this ‘meaning’ could at any time be undermined by some random sceptical thought, and which in turn therefore fosters an almost hysterical hostility towards any dissenting voice. Like heretics in the middle ages, ‘deniers’ must consequently be silenced by any means possible, whether that means de-platforming them and banning them from any form of media, or removing them from any office they may hold, especially if that office involves any form of teaching.

What is most disturbing about this descent into mob rule, however, is not just the rejection of disinterested enquiry and reasoned debate – or even the existential malaise which it clearly signifies – but the fact that, unlike in the middle ages, and the centuries of ever-increasing enlightenment which followed, science may no longer be able to come to our rescue. For by abandoning actual science in favour of whatever narrative would garner public funding, scientists like Michael Mann have not only subverted their own disciple and weakened the status of science in general, but have undermined the entire epistemological foundation upon which the modern world is built: a principled and determined commitment to basing our beliefs solely upon empirical evidence and reasoned argument, which, until now, has kept our feet firmly on the ground and our beliefs tethered to reality, and without which all manner of fantasy, delusion and madness is made possible, including, it seems, the belief that a colourless, odourless gas, which comprises just 0.04% of the atmosphere and is essential to all life on earth, is actually a pollutant born of our nature-despoiling original sin, which, unless we recant and mend our ways, will eventually see us all burning in hell or plunged beneath the waters of a second great flood.

It is thus for his contribution to ushering in this new dark age of ignorance and superstition that Michael Mann is most culpable. And it is for this, therefore, that he cannot be forgiven.

The Phenomenology and Politics of Hatred

I have long been of the view that, in general, we human beings have only a very vague understanding of our emotions. The result is that we very often misuse emotional terms, either applying them to the wrong objects or using them in a way so vague that their more precise meaning gets lost, thereby actually hindering our better understanding. 

Take the word ‘hate’, for instance, which, at present, is probably the most overused and misunderstood word on the planet. As a trivial but commonplace example, consider, for instance, the statement: ‘I hate Brussels Sprouts’. Nothing wrong with that, you might think. Lots of people hate Brussels Sprouts. Except that, strictly speaking, it is no more possible to hate Brussels Sprouts than it is to hate the Atlantic Ocean. You may find their slightly bitter taste and fusty smell not quite to your liking. You may even have an adverse reaction to them as a result of having been forced to eat them as a child. But neither of these forms of aversion is the same as hatred.

Now, of course, you may wonder why this is important. After all, if I say that I hate Brussels Sprouts, all I’m really doing is expressing my strong dislike for them. My choice of words to express this dislike is irrelevant as long as everyone knows what I mean.

The problem with this approach to language, however, is that by using a word like ‘hate’ as a ‘catch all’ term simply to express strong dislike, we forget or never even come to properly comprehend what the word really means. This in turn makes it increasingly likely that it will be misapplied, which, at a time when more and more people are being prosecuted for ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’, can have serious consequences. This being the case, it is absolutely vital, therefore, not only that we properly understand what the word actually denotes, but that we become far more careful in its usage.

So what is genuine hatred? 

The first thing to note is that it is an emotion with a strong cognitive element. This differs markedly from purely affective or non-cognitive emotions such as disgust, which is largely a purely reflexive response to anything visibly or malodorously diseased or decomposing and very probably has its origin in our deep evolutionary past when members the species who did not exhibit this reaction to carrion and the like tended to contract more infectious diseases and were thus weeded out of the gene pool through the process of natural selection.

Other emotions with very little cognitive content include what one might call aesthetic emotions such as awe, which results almost exclusively from sensory overload, usually as a consequence of being confronted by something very big, very loud and very powerful, like a large body of water during a storm. Thus while one may not be able to hate the Atlantic Ocean, one can certainly be overawed by it. Hatred, in contrast, is neither a reflex reaction nor a response to sensory stimuli, but the concomitant emotion to a very particular set of beliefs.

This then brings us to the second thing to be noted about hatred, which, strange as it may initially sound, is that it is what one might call an upward-looking emotion, not in the same way as respect or admiration, but more like envy, to which it is closely related, the two emotions having a number of characteristics in common, not the least of which is the fact that, like envy, hatred is always directed towards another person or group of people, never towards inanimate objects.

Again, one might find this questionable, not least because, in the case of hatred, we regularly use the word so loosely that we now feel free to apply it to almost anything, while in the case of envy it is almost universally assumed that we envy others for what they have: a beautiful home, a new and expensive car, etc. However, it is not for their possessions, themselves, that we envy those who have them. In fact, a desire to possess what somebody else has is what is properly called covetousness – even though we hardly ever use this term anymore. More to the point, it is quite possible for us to covet someone else’s possessions without envying them. For envy is less about what someone has than about who or, more especially, what they are.

Take, for example, the exceptionally handsome, athletically gifted boy at school who was liked by all the teachers, inevitably chosen as captain of the rugby team, and is now a Member of Parliament. Or the very attractive girl who starred in all the school plays, effortlessly obtained a place at Oxford and is now a TV presenter for the BBC. We envy such people not because of their success and good fortune – or any of the material benefits their success has almost certainly brought them – but rather because we feel that their success was never in doubt. Indeed, it is almost as if success and good fortune were part of their birthright. As, in a way, they very likely were. For good looks, natural athleticism and even, to some extent, intelligence are genetic, being passed down to those blessed with them by their parents. The good looking girl at school, for instance, will almost certainly have had an attractive mother who, by virtue of her own good looks, would almost certainly have been able to attract for herself a very successful husband. As a result of his success, he, in turn, would have been able to provide all the material benefits his family could have wanted: a beautiful home, the best schools, foreign holidays, and everything his children ever needed in order for themselves to be successful, including the confidence and self-belief to expect that such good fortune would go on following them throughout their lives, as indeed it has.

To us lesser mortals, for whom life is an uphill struggle full of failures and disappointments, it is this ease and apparent inevitability with which success comes to these seemingly blessed individuals that really sets them apart and makes us envy them in a way we could never envy mere lottery winners, for instance. For anyone can win the lottery. Indeed, we could win it ourselves. What we could never be, however, is one of these favoured few for whom life has always held such promise. And while, for some – those more innocent among us, perhaps – this special state of perceived though almost inexplicable distinction elicits only admiration and perhaps even hero-worship, to our more jaundiced eyes it rather reveals to us what we have always known but never wanted to admit, that we, ourselves, are not among their number.

Indeed, it is this bitter recognition, along with the even deeper level of disappointment to which it gives rise, that is the real essence of envy, and which, if left to fester or, worse still, picked at like a running sore, can eventually lead to resentment and even malice. 

We see this most clearly in our celebrity culture, which places a small number of sacrificial deities upon a pedestal almost with the overt intention of knocking them off again should they exhibit even the slightest human weakness, much to the delight of those who take pleasure in seeing their idols brought low. For envy is always, at least in part, a tacit expression of our own self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy, which are partially – if only temporarily – alleviated when those we have placed above us are revealed to be no better than ourselves. 

As such, envy tells us more about the envier than it does about the envied. And the same is true of hatred, which, unless or until it is actually taken out on its victim, is far more an affliction of the hater than of the hated. Indeed, a hated person can often be oblivious to the fact that he or she is the object of such a passion, while this can never be the case with respect to the person who has this passion burning in their breast. More to the point, like envy, hatred flows from that same deep well of dissatisfaction with ourselves that is the source of so many of our negative emotions, the two being so  closely related that envy can very often be the precursor of hatred, the one being transformed into the other by the addition of two further cognitive ingredients. 

The first of these is the belief that at least some of the comparative advantage which the envied person enjoys has been gained at our expense, often as a result of our respective membership of different groups. Indeed, holding this belief is one of most common ways in which we assuage some of the more invidious aspects of being envious. For given that the last thing any of us wants to admit is that the apparent superiority of those we envy is innate – thereby making our own inferiority equally fixed and inalienable – we naturally prefer to attribute their good fortune to anything other than natural ability. Given the further fact that good fortune, along with good looks and natural athleticism, very often go hand in hand with wealth and privilege, the most prominent among these alternative explanations for the envied person’s relative advantage is therefore quite naturally their social position: their family’s wealth, their social connections, and all the potential advantages and opportunities for advancement which such a position brings with it and which we, ourselves, are unfairly denied.

As a strategic solution to our fundamental dissatisfaction with ourselves, however, this approach brings with it a number of problems of its own. For even though it allows us to go on believing that our relative lack of success is not the result of our own deficiencies – and to therefore feel better about ourselves – all it really does is replace our former envy with a long-term sense of grievance and injustice, which is equally as difficult to redress and which can be just as debilitating and inimical to our happiness, leaving us just as bitter and resentful as the original envy it was meant to alleviate.

Even this, however, does not necessarily lead to full-blown hatred. For this to occur, one more cognitive element is required. And this is the belief that, from their position of superiority – whether this be personal or social – those who have the advantage over us also look down on us as their inferiors, regarding us with a downward-looking emotion such as contempt or disdain, which, when perceived as such, throws in our face the very judgement about ourselves we most wish to avoid, thereby either giving rise to a sense of defeat and utter worthlessness which may well push many into a state of depression, or inciting an inner rage and festering hatred directed towards those who have inflicted this torment upon us.

Of course, this too may be mitigated by a sense of grievance and injustice if we believe that the way in which the now hated person or group gained their position of superiority was unfair, dishonourable or even criminal. Indeed, we may even come to think of our hatred as something righteous and noble. However, even if we are able to dismiss the contempt shown to us in this way, the mere fact that the hated person or group felt warranted in treating us in this manner, combined with the way in which we ourselves reacted – bristling with sudden rage – in itself reveals the intolerable truth, not just with respect to how we appear to others, but with regard to how we feel about ourselves. And it is never pleasant.

Indeed, so unpleasant is it to be made to feel this way that one might have thought that human beings would have long since worked out ways to avoid being thus triggered. And, historically, it could be said that, once upon a time, we did. For by helping people to understand both themselves and others, and the propensity we all have for immoderate and self-destructive emotions, both Christianity and Buddhism, in their different ways, once offered us paths towards achieving the kind of self-acceptance and inner peace which only self-knowledge can provide and which is the only real defence against the many provocations which life casts in our way. In their purest, most authentic forms, as exemplified by their respective founders, both religions thus provided a kind of antidote to hatred and, for some, still do.

The trouble is that for all those who elect to pursue some form of philosophical or meditative path towards a hoped-for enlightenment and spiritual peace, there are many more who not only now regard all such pretensions as delusional and ridiculous – such being the disregard with which all such peaceful forms of religion are currently held – but who, in their discontent and unhappiness with life, seemingly prefer to indulge their hatred rather than rid themselves of it: a preference which is unfortunately greatly facilitated by the fact that, although the beliefs upon which hatred is founded have to be credible – otherwise we wouldn’t believe them – none of them actually has to be true, thereby making it extremely easy for us, not only to nurture hatred in ourselves – by repeatedly rehearsing a fictional but plausible narrative which constantly stirs our blood – but to incite hatred in others, especially in a group setting, where all the aspiring demagogue has to do is point his finger at some other identifiable group, allude to whatever real or imaginary advantages they are perceived to have, and then describe his audience’s own disadvantages – preferably in the most lurid and outrageous terms possible – before finally claiming that this injustice has only been allowed to stand because those in the position of advantage hold the more disadvantaged group in absolute disdain.

A fairly obvious example of this, of course, is the way in which the Nazis managed to get so many ordinary Germans to hate Jews during the 1920s and 30s. Admittedly, this was under some fairly extreme conditions. But it is under extreme conditions that hatred largely flourishes: in this case the extreme poverty which ravaged Germany after the first world war, largely as a result of the reparations the country was obliged to pay under the Treaty of Versailles, and which, between 1921 and 1923, plunged the Weimar Republic into a period of hyperinflation, wiping out many people’s savings, destroying businesses and causing mass unemployment, for which the Jews were made a very easy scapegoat.

This was because, from the Middle Ages onwards, Jews had been forbidden to own land throughout much of Europe and had consequently gravitated towards businesses and professions which allowed them to accumulate more portable forms of wealth, most notably the trade in precious gems and banking: the very business, of course, which most Germans blamed for the financial chaos which had afflicted them. As a result, it was thus very easy not only to identify wealthy Jewish bankers, and hence Jews in general, as the culprits, but to further suggest that, not being true Germans, they had no regard for those they had made to suffer, thus fulfilling all three of the cognitive conditions required to arouse hatred.

Not, of course, that this is the whole story. For there was still a massive chasm of morality and common decency to be crossed before these three basic prerequisites for hatred could be channelled into mass murder. And for this to have happened, many more additional human weaknesses and accidents of history had to come together than I can possibly examine here. One factor or determinant that does merit special attention, however, is the way in which both the second and the third cognitive conditions for hatred were further manipulated in order to render their object that much more likely to be the target of violent retribution. For the claim was that neither the harm which the Jews were supposedly inflicting on Germany as a nation, nor the contempt in which they were further assumed to hold the German people, were merely the result of them not being entirely German, but were rather the consequence of something far more damning: of them not actually being entirely human, an idea which probably found its ugliest and most shocking expression in the cartoons commissioned by Julius Streicher for his virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, which depicted Jews in a variety of inhuman guises ranging from the daemonic to the verminous.

The result was that by encouraging Germans to view Jews as less than human, the Nazis were also giving the German public their tacit permission to withhold from them the empathy and moral regard we normally bestow upon all our fellow human beings. And it was this, more than anything else, I believe, that led to the concentration camps and the gas chambers. For as the contemporary German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued in ‘Being and Time’, it is our perception of others as fellow human beings, rather than as mere things to be used or, worse still, pieces of meat to be discarded, that prompts us to treat them in the way in which we, ourselves, would want to be treated. Once this perception was removed, all such moral inhibitions also therefore disappeared, permitting ordinary Germans to give free rein to all the pent up grievances and dissatisfactions with life which more than a decade of grinding poverty had instilled in them, thereby allowing them to vent their rage on those they held to be responsible, smashing up their businesses, driving them from their homes, and watching with pitiless self-satisfaction as those who had once seemingly held the advantage over them were stripped of their possessions and herded onto cattle trucks to be taken to who knows where.

If there is any consolation to be taken from this dreadful period in our history, however, it is that, mercifully, such hate-based ethnic cleansing is actually quite rare – especially on such a scale – not least because it requires two identifiable ethnic groups to be living in close proximity, which, historically, has largely only occurred in large metropolitan cities such as Rome at the height of its imperial power. Thus while history is littered with examples of ethnic massacres at a local level – with one quarter of a city turning on another – the only other instances of large scale hate-based ethnic cleansing that readily come to mind are the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Another reason why this should be so is the fact that while racism – a fairly obvious prerequisite for ethnic cleansing – is fairly commonplace, racial hatred, strange as this may sound, is also, mercifully, quite rare. In fact, most forms of racism have nothing to do with hatred at all. When India was part of the British empire, for instance, many if not most of the British colonial officials who were sent out to administer it were almost certainly racists, looking down on the empire’s native populations as feckless, mendacious and lazy. But they didn’t hate them. For the simple fact is that one cannot hate someone one looks down on. If anything, the hatred would have flowed the other way, directed against these imperial overlords who ruled a land that wasn’t theirs, plundering its wealth and living in the style of ancient maharajas, while generally regarding their colonial charges with haughty disdain.

Indeed, while racism and racial hatred are often thought to be synonymous, viewed from this phenomenological perspective, racism and hatred are actually antithetical – one looking down while the other looks up – with antisemitism constituting an almost unique exception to this rule due to the relative success and prosperity which members of the Jewish diaspora managed to attain in the various foreign lands they came to inhabit. What is even more noteworthy, however, is the fact that when not a spontaneous and often unconscious response to those we implicitly regard as inferior – as was typically the case with respect to British colonial officials stationed almost anywhere in the empire – racism is often nurtured in those who embrace it with the principal, if not always conscious aim of fostering just such an attitude of superiority towards others. For among those of us plagued by a sense of our own inadequacy – no matter how much we may strive to deny it – belittling others and according them an inferior status is one of the most satisfying ways we have of feeling better about ourselves. 

Back in the 1970s, for instance, when the BBC still permitted racist comedy, there was a comedian called Jim Davidson who had an imaginary West Indian friend called Chalky White, whom he used to portray by putting on a very poor West Indian accent. His routine was then to place Chalky in various situations in which he could make jokes at the latter’s expense, revealing a rather naïve, almost childish ignorance of the world which quite naturally elevated both Davidson, himself – and, of course, his audience – into a position of patronage and condescension. 

In fact, most of the racism I have witnessed during my life has been of this type. It’s why it is most often to be found among groups who have few accomplishments and little to be proud of in their lives and who therefore try to compensate for this by putting down others: others of another race being a particularly easy target.

That’s not to say, of course, that this, in itself, isn’t baneful, injurious and unwholesome, particularly as those who adopt this strategy as a way of alleviating their own dissatisfaction with themselves also very often feel the need to ‘act it out’, providing an alternative rationale and justification for their attitude by giving voice to numerous violent expressions of a hatred they don’t really feel, in order to make others to believe that it is this that is the true cause of their antipathy. Thus while genuine hatred may play very little part in the actual aetiology of this type of racism, in playing out the role of the racist, those who opt for this solution very often end up feigning an emotion which, over time, can get pretty close to becoming the real thing. 

More to the point, there is at least one way in which this kind of compensatory racism, as one might call it, can actually generate genuine hatred. This happens when there is an inversion of the constructed superiority/inferiority relationship upon which this form of racism depends.

Imagine, for instance, that we have a friend like Chalky White whom we regularly belittle for his lack of ability in some particular field. Suppose, however, that one day he exhibits far more ability in this field than we, ourselves, are able to demonstrate and does so in front of a room full of people who have all previously witnessed our belittling of him on this very score. Not only does he thus turn the tables on us, revealing himself to be the one in a position of superiority, but he also makes us look a fool in the eyes of all those present, thereby making us the potential object of others’ contempt and providing us with all three of the cognitive preconditions required for triggering hatred. Indeed, such a dramatic inversion of the superiority/inferiority relationship can often spark an uncontrollable rage made all the more overwhelming by the fact that the person responsible for our shame has also left us bereft of the very compensatory strategy we usually employ to protect us from such humiliation. 

While both the real and counterfeit forms of hatred to which compensatory racism can give rise are thus clearly recognisable phenomena and are always likely to be with us – fulfilling, as they do, a certain psychological need – the good news is that the emotional dynamic required to produce them, as illustrated in the above examples, is so complex that neither is ever likely to become widespread. While there is much talk these days of White Supremacist groups posing a threat to democracy and public order, in political terms such groups are always therefore likely to remain a freakish sideshow on the fringes of politics and are never again likely to become mainstream. 

More to the point, when it comes to mainstream politics, hatred in it most basic form – arising as it so often does out of our sense of injustice at the disparities of wealth and privilege that are to be found in almost any society – is far more the preserve of the socialist left than of the conservative right and, indeed, is regularly used as a galvanizing force by left wing activists who, fully cognizant of its cognitive underpinnings, carefully nurture among their followers the belief that those who have all the power also have nothing but contempt for rest of us. 

In the United Kingdom, for instance, which has very little history of either antisemitism or race based conflict, it is this division between the haves and the have-nots – the conservative ruling class and the toiling masses – rather than any differentiation based on race, that has not only constituted the principal fault line in the country’s political history, but has also been the locus of most of its recent historical unrest. Indeed, one only has to remember the miners’ strikes of the 1970s and 80s to appreciate the strength and depth of the emotions which this division can arouse.

That is not to say, of course, that all those battling against what they regarded as inequality and injustice always succumbed to hatred. Having spent large parts of my life in areas of the country where Tories were generally regarded as a malignant disease, however, there have been times when I have witnessed more hatred in the hearts of my fellow countrymen than I thought possible in a civilised society. And this was especially the case in the late 1970s and early 80s when, after nearly two decades of financial mismanagement and economic collapse, the hated Conservatives, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher – probably the most hated Prime Minister in the country’s history – were returned to power with a programme for government that was principally designed to remedy our economic woes, but which was almost universally interpreted in a way that strongly reinforced historic working class prejudices. For by cutting public expenditure to balance the government’s budget, while simultaneously cutting taxes to stimulate the economy, to those brought up in an age of Keynes, Mrs. Thatcher’s entire strategy for returning the country to economic health seemed more designed to benefit the rich while further impoverishing those dependent on welfare benefits and public services than to achieve her stated economic aims. What really made her hated, however, was not just her insistence that her ‘Austrian’ style economics were correct – as, indeed, they proved to be – but the fact that she made no attempt to conceal her scorn for those who championed the underclass she was apparently further disadvantaging. For believing that it was the welfare state, itself, which, by disincentivising aspiration and fostering dependency, was not only the root cause of the country’s economic decline but was also injurious to the people themselves – depriving them of a full and active life – she was the first and only Prime Minister in our history who ever tried to reverse our national decline by forcing people to face economic reality and take more responsibility for themselves, rather than handing this responsibility over to the state.

To a post-war generation brought up to believe that the state was the beneficent provider of all good things and that the last thing they would ever have to face again was economic reality, what this precipitated, therefore, was something akin to an existential crisis. For not only was this cold-hearted representative of the ruling class telling them that they had to solve life’s problems for themselves, but they were also being made to face the terrible truth that the life free from want they had always been promised was a fantasy – a fairy tale for children – and that it was time for them to grow up and live in the real world, which was hard and cold and totally unforgiving. 

In presenting the people of this country with such a pitiless and implacable message, not only was Margaret Thatcher thus quite clearly assuming a position of moral superiority but, by rigorously pursuing unpopular policies and forcing people to do what they didn’t want to do, she was also making it perfectly clear that she held their contrary opinions in utter contempt, thereby meeting all three cognitive conditions necessary for making herself hated. 

In this, however, not only was she possibly the most selfless Prime Minister this country has ever had – as well as the most thick-skinned – but she was also the country’s saviour. Because she was right: her policies worked. By the mid-1980s, the economy was booming. From having been the sick man of Europe, by 1985, Britain had become a European dynamo. And although Margaret Thatcher, herself, has always remained a monster in the folklore of the left, as the country grew more prosperous, the more widespread hatred to which she had initially been subjected gradually abated.

In fact, from the late eighties onwards, until the financial crash of 2008, Britain became as hate-free as I think I’ve ever known it. As the British people gradually got used to more people of colour living among them, not only did the endemic racism of the 60s and 70s also slowly disappear but, even more significantly, the fundamentally Marxist Labour party of the previous six or seven decades – which, throughout those years, had fought an unceasing class war – was now at least superficially transformed into New Labour: a centrist party which even embraced a form of capitalism, leaving the population at large with very little about which to argue and even less to hate each other over.

All that ended, however, in 2008 when, as I explained in ‘The End of an Era (Part II)’, the bubble of mostly false prosperity which had largely kept the nation together, finally burst, forcing the incoming Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition to once again turn to the Margaret Thatcher textbook of fiscal responsibility, which, in turn, opened up all the old class divisions, eventually leading to the return of the old-style Marxist Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. 

Not that this last point is likely to be as important or even relevant as I suspect Jeremy Corby would like it to be. For over the previous twenty or thirty years, unbeknownst to most of us, a new political ideology had been steadily coming to take the place of old-school socialism, even though most of us didn’t recognise it as such. Indeed, we used tell jokes about it, calling it ‘political correctness’ and recounting tales of how this new trend in our political life had totally ‘gone mad’. What we didn’t realise, however, was that what we were joking about was actually a manifestation of what is, in fact, a fairly old political philosophy, which owes its origin to the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci.

Like many Marxist thinkers of his generation, Gramsci had believed that at some point during the first world war, the ordinary soldiers of each nation would eventually turn on their ruling elites and join together in a great European socialist revolution. After all, as members of a world-wide proletariat, they had more in common with each other – or so it was thought – than they had with those who commanded them and sent them to their slaughter. When this great revolution failed to occur, however, Marxist philosophers had to rethink some of their basic assumptions about the international fraternity of the toiling masses and recognise that the ties of home, family, church and motherland were actually far stronger than the rather abstract category of class.

Another Italian Marxist philosopher who also clearly saw this was Giovanni Gentile. Realising that in order to build a socialist society, people very often had to sacrifice their own personal interests to those of the collective, and that people are generally far more willing to do this if the collective in question comprises their own family, their village or town, or indeed their country, Gentile argued that it was upon these deeper allegiances that a new form of socialism therefore had to be built. This new form of socialism he consequently called National Socialism, better known as Fascism – named after the bundle of rods surrounding a single axe which were carried by lictors in ancient Rome to signify magisterial authority – the main principles of which he outlined in a book called ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, which was originally attributed Benito Mussolini, though how much Il Duce actually contributed to it is open to question. 

In contrast, Antonio Gramsci went in what one might almost call the opposite direction. He too recognised that people’s allegiances to the institutions of family, church and the nation were far stronger than any comradeship they may have independently felt towards their fellow workers. But rather than embrace these institutions, he argued that, for socialism to succeed, they had to be destroyed. Not all at once, of course – which would have likely been impossible – and not through violence – which would have likely been counter-productive – but slowly over time, through a process of re-education amounting to a cultural revolution which, he argued, had to precede any political revolution. 

It was this central idea of a slow ‘long march’ to cultural change that was then picked up by a group of academics of different disciplines at the University of Frankfurt. These included Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock, who were the original founders of the group, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, who were arguably its most famous representatives, and a number of others who, collectively, came to be known as the Frankfurt School. 

Not that they actually remained in Frankfurt for very long. For rightly fearing Nazi persecution during the late 1920s and early 1930’s, they each gradually made their way to Columbia University in New York, from where, over the next three or four decades, they and their followers slowly spread their cultural revolution all across the western world, firstly by propagating their ideas throughout academia, itself, especially in the social sciences, where ‘critical theory’, as their methodology was known, quickly became the dominant form of debate, and then by seeding all the other cultural institutions of western society – the news media, publishing, the theatre, cinema and education in general – with their students. In this way they were able to amplify their message exponentially, as Gramsci himself had recognised. For if you take over the institutions of a culture you very quickly take over the culture itself, from which point on it then becomes a relatively simple matter of replacing old cultural norms with those of a new, more progressive ideology.

In addition to working to eliminate any religion which still professed the kind of conservative values which might have constituted an impediment to their progress – which, in America, largely meant Christianity – their overall strategy was to undermine and replace the existing culture along three principal axes:

1. Firstly, they sought to undermine the institutions of marriage and the family, initially by promoting feminism and sexual freedom (it was Herbert Marcuse, for instance, who coined the phrase ‘make love not war’) and then, more latterly, by normalising homosexuality and promoting gender fluidity.
2. Secondly, they sought to rewrite the history of both individual nations and European civilization as whole, partly through the passive strategy of almost entirely ignoring the latter’s great achievements – in the arts and sciences, engineering and technology, jurisprudence and the development of democratic government – but mostly through the far more aggressive strategy of concentrating, instead, on the historical expansion of European culture and civilization around the world through conquest and colonisation and the consequent extermination or enslavement of the indigenous people it encountered.
3. Thirdly – and possibly most importantly – they sought to undermine the belief in objective truth, itself, replacing it, instead, with a thoroughgoing cultural relativism in which all perspectives upon the world were seen as equally valid and in which rational argument, scientific method and even mathematics were viewed as the product of one culture in particular, i.e. European culture, which not only meant that these previously dominant forms of intellectual enquiry were now believed to have no greater claim upon the truth than any other ways of perceiving the world, but were also made to seem fundamentally racist and sexist, owing their origin and propagation to mostly European (white) men.

Basically, what the West told itself – and gradually brought itself to believe – was that all opinions were equally valid and that science and rational thought were intellectual straightjackets imposed on people to prevent them from freeing their minds; that Europeans had no culture of their own except that which they had ruthlessly appropriated from others; and that the family was a patriarchal institution designed to oppress women, from which they could only free themselves through economic and sexual liberation.

From the point of view of reinventing Marxism, however, this systematic demolition of European culture and history had one even more significant consequence in that it also provided a solution to Marxism’s traditional problem of basing its ideology on class identity, which, as both Gentile and Gramsci had recognised, did not resonate well with everyone, and was soon found to be even less appealing in aspirational America where penniless immigrants strove to become millionaires and were not therefore very much interested in class-based politics. By concentrating on the West’s intellectual, historical and social failings, however, this new form of Marxism was now able to appeal to a whole raft of other identities – particularly those of gender, race and sexual orientation – all of which could not only be shown to have been subject to some form of discrimination, but were far more inalienable than mere social status, in that they were not identities which people could simply cast off and leave behind them.

Even more felicitously, these alternative categories of social victimisation were largely single poles in a binary pairing, thereby rendering those responsible for their oppression that much more obvious. For if women had been traditionally disadvantaged due to their gender, it could only be because men had taken advantage of them. If people of colour had been abused because of their race, it had to be because Europeans had abused them. And if homosexuals were discriminated against because of their sexuality, then it could only be because heterosexuals were prejudiced against them. The result was that one group – that of white, heterosexual males – could now be presented not only as having historically held all the power, but as having held this power by keeping all other groups oppressed, thereby opening the door to a new social revolution in which these wrongs could be addressed, the reign of white, heterosexual males brought to an end, and a new age of equality introduced. 

The problem, of course – although I don’t think it has ever been properly recognised as such – was that this analysis also painted white, heterosexual males in such a way as to perfectly incite hatred in those they were believed to have disadvantaged. For not only were they said to have held all the power – and to have systematically abused those they had held the power over – but, for centuries, they had behaved as if this were perfectly natural, thereby evincing in their attitude a belief in their own superiority and the inferiority of others. 

As a result, the concepts of ‘white privilege’, ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘homophobia’ are now central to almost every cultural and political debate, with white, heterosexual males being made the objects of almost universal scorn. And who is it, today, who most personifies this universally hated archetype? Why, Donald Trump, of course: a man who is not only totally unapologetic about what he is – even revelling in the fact that so many people seem to regard him as a monster – but who, in becoming president of the United States and placing himself in a position of power over those who consequently came to hate him even more, inflicted on his opponents one of the most humiliating inversions of the superiority/inferiority relationships in history. For prior to his election, the progressive left – those who now embody the ideology of Cultural Marxism, whether they are aware of this or not – regarded both him and his followers with contempt. Hilary Clinton even described his followers as a ‘basket of deplorables’. They were uneducated hillbillies, rednecks, and white supremacists whose representative and very personification should never have been allowed to attain the presidency. The result, therefore, was that when he did, the outpouring of rage was almost hysterical, especially among women who seemed, quite literally, to lose their minds, donning ‘pussy hats’ and howling ‘Nooo!’ at the empty sky.

What is particularly interesting about this, however, is that it is not the only instance of a such an inversion to have occurred as a result of Cultural Marxist indoctrination over the last few years. For something very similar happened with regard to Brexit.

I say this because, before the referendum, it was widely believed that the principal reason why supporters of Brexit wanted to leave the EU was their opposition to mass immigration. This, therefore, not only made them xenophobic, nationalistic ‘Little Englanders’ but also, by definition, racists. Indeed, within the mainstream media they were regularly represented not only as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals but as fascists, white supremacists and Nazis. Due to their supposed low intelligence and limited education, however, it was also assumed that when the vote came, they would be soundly defeated by all the educated, enlightened, ‘right-thinking’ people who made up the majority of the British population and who would clearly see the benefits of remaining in the EU. When this didn’t happen, therefore – when the basket of deplorables actually won – the outpouring of hostility against them was very similar to that which met the election of President Trump five months later. Moreover, the hatred which was then unleashed throughout the UK has only strengthen and become more visceral in the three years of waiting and uncertainty that have followed. 

So what do these two events have in common and what is actually going on here?

The first thing to note is that, in certain ways, Cultural Marxism has a very similar aetiology to compensatory racism, in that they are both based on our primordial insecurities about ourselves. Awash with a sense of his own inadequacy, the compensatory racist, as described earlier, belittles and derides another ethnic group in order to feel superior to them and thus better about himself. Similarly, those who subscribe to Cultural Marxism – whether or not they identify themselves as doing so – deflect whatever doubts and fears they may have about their own ability to cope in a cruel and hostile world by blaming their self-doubt and sense of inadequacy on whichever group they hold to be responsible for their oppression, thereby similarly alleviating their feelings of existential angst.

However, unlike compensatory racism, Cultural Marxism doesn’t stop there. For not only does it tell its subscribers that they are not to blame for whatever shortcomings they may feel – these having been fostered or even ground into them by those who have kept them oppressed – it also tells them that, in their blamelessness, they are morally superior to those who have wilfully and malignly inflicted this oppression upon them, thereby effectively turning the tables on their erstwhile tormentors and allowing them to now look down upon those who had previously had the upper hand. And why not? After all, is it not said that the meek shall inherit the earth? And are not those who have suffered centuries of oppression, by definition, the meek? 

Even this, however, is not the end of the story. For the conclusion to which this whole new compensatory philosophy of the oppressed then inevitably gives rise is the belief that if we could only eliminate all the racist, sexist homophobes who have been responsible for all these centuries of oppression, then we would finally arrive at the promised land: a socialist utopia in which no one would be abused, put down or reviled; where tolerance, equality and communal harmony would reign; and where everyone would have what they need without reference to wealth, status or power. The problem with this, however, is that this whole wishful vision is of course a total fantasy: another fairy tale for children who refuse to confront the harsh vicissitudes of life, and who hate not only those who constitute an immediate threat to their delusions – uncivilized monsters like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson – but those, like Margaret Thatcher, who would force them to recognise and face up to the existential fears that are basis of their desperate attempt to avoid reality.

For it is reality, of course, that is the ultimate problem. It is too big for us, too overwhelming; while we are too small and too insignificant. It’s why we have always needed an omnipotent god or an all-powerful state to protect us and provide for us, and why we are even willing to give up our liberty and right to self-determination to an undemocratic, international institution like the EU, if only it will keep us safe from reality in its comforting, bureaucratic embrace. 

However, this is where the whole strategy falls down. For reality is nothing if not persistent and is currently not just knocking at our door but, due to the western world’s economic and monetary policies over the last three decades, is practically taking a sledgehammer to it. Indeed, as I have tried to demonstrate in my last few essays, the post war era, during which the West has prospered more than at any other time, is coming to an end. Another financial crash, on scale far more destructive than in 2008, is on its way, and the result will be a new economic reality far different from that which any of us have known before. 

And it is this that is the real cause of our current discord. For while most people wouldn’t be able to say why or how the world has gone wrong, most of us sense that it has. And it is our different responses to this awareness that now divides us, not along lines of class or race, but between those who embrace reality, no matter how challenging it may be, and those who want to hide from it and do not want it thrust in their faces, which, of course, is exactly what Brexiteers and supporters of Donald Trump, by their very existence, do. For it is reality they represent. And it is this for which they are fundamentally and existentially hated.