In 2020, governments created the largest single-year reduction in human CO₂ emissions ever recorded. At the peak of the global lockdowns, daily human-origin CO₂ emissions fell by an estimated 17% — the equivalent of removing the entire economies of the United States and Europe from the carbon cycle for months. But scientists at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which tracks atmospheric CO₂, recorded that the September 2020 monthly average came in at 411.29 ppm, up from 408.54 ppm in September 2019. The Observatory also reported that May 2020 produced the highest atmospheric concentration of CO2 on record.
The ‘anthropogenic’ causation theory for recent climate events holds that agricultural and industrial CO₂ emissions are the main driver of rising atmospheric CO₂: and that atmospheric CO₂ is the main cause of increases in global temperatures since 1870; and the sole driver since 1970. According to this theory, a 17% global cut in human CO₂ emissions across a full calendar year ought to have produced a measurable declension in atmospheric CO₂ and a slight fall in temperatures. The lockdowns could have been designed as a real-world test of the anthropogenic CO₂ climate theory. And the theory failed the test. Atmospheric CO2 rose as normal, and average global temperatures also rose in 2020. This remarkable real-world falsification of the anthropogenic climate theory ought to have been treated as excellent news, as it indicates forecasts of a forthcoming ‘climate catastrophe’ are wrong. But it received zero public attention and little comment from ‘climate scientists’.
I write as an academic who spent fifteen years in British academia authoring papers and books that took the anthropogenic causation of climate change as a given, and attracted a large public research grant to investigate local community and religious responses to the climate narrative. I had thought that the anthropogenic causation of climate change was settled science. But then the COVID pandemic arose, and I watched Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model drive the UK into lockdown on projections that ignored the real-world test case of the Diamond Princess Cruise ship, which indicated infection fatality rates one eighth of those in Ferguson’s model at 0.125%. When the ‘dominant scientific narrative’ about origins of the allegedly novel coronavirus alighted on the incredible claim that the SARS-CoV-2 genome had been spread by sales of pangolin in the Wuhan Wet Market, my faith in ‘settled science’ began to fall apart. I started researching the network of key figures in the manipulation of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and I soon discovered Ralph Baric’s gain-of-function laboratory at the University of North Carolina, materials from which were transferred by his research assistant Zhengli-Shi to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014. But despite the evidence trail from Baric’s UNC lab to the WIV in the list of authors of the first paper on the SARS-CoV-2 genome, and clear statements in the article that the research was funded by US and Chinese health and scientific agencies, a letter in The Lancet was published in April 2020 claiming the SARS-CoV-2 genome was zoonotic in origin.
A computer model was used to lock up the world in 2020, but it had been used many times to predict catastrophic outcomes from other viral infections that never materialised. The model was incredibly badly constructed according to statisticians who subsequently studied Ferguson’s code. But the computer model did do something useful. It created an empirical real-world stress test of the outcomes of another set of computer models – General Circulation Models – that for decades have been used to predict catastrophic outcomes from the modest increase in global temperatures since the tailend of the Little Ice Age in 1870.
This strange chain of events led me – despite having been an academic advocate of the anthropogenic climate narrative for fifteen years – to investigate all over again the scientific basis for the claim that human emissions of CO₂ are driving the planet towards a climate catastrophe. There are hundreds of thousands of papers published on climate science, climate governance, and climate finance. So my principle of selection was to only study papers based on real-world observations of physical objects, and to ignore the vast majority of climate science outputs which are based on computer model simulations of the climate, and on non-empirical axioms such as that the Earth’s climate has a given ‘sensitivity’ to a particular level of CO₂ in the atmosphere. What I found as I began to look at climate science with fresh eyes was a level of scientific manipulation of climate data that reminded me precisely of the manipulation of ‘the science’ that went on during the Covid19 events.
‘Climate Denial’ as ‘Pre-Propaganda’
Before examining specific instances of scientific manipulation, it is worth pausing on the term that does more than any other to enforce the consensus: climate denier. As Philip Hammond documented in these pages, British environmentalist Mark Lynas proposed in 2006 that climate skepticism should be treated as morally equivalent to Holocaust denial. The term subsequently entered mainstream political and journalistic discourse with remarkable speed, acquiring the force of a neutral descriptive category when it is, in Jacques Ellul’s terms, a form of pre-propaganda — the manufacture of a conceptual framework designed to make the categorisation of dissent as moral contamination feel like common sense rather than a rhetorical operation.
By equating scientific scepticism about the anthropogenic causes of recent climate events with denial of Nazi-era genocide, the phrase pre-emptively criminalises the epistemological practice upon which science depends: the disciplined examination of evidence; the falsification of hypotheses; the revision of models when observations deviate from their predictions. Those who questioned Michael Mann’s infamously inaccurate Hockey Stick temperature reconstruction, which completely erased the Medieval Warm period – a period that was significantly warmer than recent decades – were not denying that the Holocaust happened. They were doing what McIntyre and McKitrick did with rigour and transparency in their 2003 and 2005 papers revealing the methodologically unsound statistical methods used by Mann in creating an arresting visual that featured in Al Gore’s movie Inconvenient Truth. The Wegman Report, commissioned by the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce, confirmed the statistical errors in Mann’s work, but it received little publicity compared to the original Hockey Stick graph.
Whose Science? Which Consensus?
Propaganda analysis often begins with the foundational question: cui bono? Who benefits? The anthropogenic climate narrative did not emerge from disinterested inquiry. Until the 1970s no serious scientist had proposed that a plant fertiliser that is essential to the process of photosynthesis, and hence to all life on Earth, and which is until today at very low levels in the atmosphere compared to the paleoclimate record, is an ‘atmospheric pollutant’ that will likely lead to civilisational collapse if it continues to rise unchecked in the atmosphere. The trail of the origins of the contemporary ‘climate governance’ and ‘net zero’ architecture that had been constructed by governmental and intergovernmental agencies, financial institutions, and energy companies, goes all the way back to the US and Canadian Technocracy movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Thorstein Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System (1921) first articulated the technocratic ideal: a rationally administered global economy governed not by markets or democratic politics but by technical experts assigning energy use quantities to every economic transaction. The Technocracy Incorporated movement of the 1930s, whose intellectual lineage Patrick Wood has traced directly into contemporary governance structures, proposed energy certificates as the currency of a post-political administrative order — each unit of economic activity measured, assigned a precise energy cost, and regulated accordingly. The technocratic dream was to bring the totality of human economic life under expert management by controlling access to energy. What the technocrats of the 1930s lacked was a mechanism capable of politically legitimating that control.
The first act of public construction of such a control system was the Club of Rome, founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, a well-connected Italian industrial magnate, and Alexander King, head of the OECD’s science programme. The Club commissioned a team at MIT under Dennis and Donella Meadows to produce a computerised simulation of global resource depletion, population growth, and industrial output. The resulting Limits to Growth report (1972) predicted civilisational collapse by 2100 if current trends continued. Its methodology was widely criticised by economists and scientists; its conclusions have proven wrong, but its political impact was transformative. It established the template — a computer model projecting catastrophe, expert consensus on urgent governance reforms, the framing of industrial civilisation as pathology — that would subsequently be deployed in the service of the UN’s ‘climate governance’ framework.
The man who translated the neo-Malthusian revival of the Limits to Growth report into the architecture of global environmental and climate governance was Maurice Strong: a Canadian oilman, David Rockefeller protégé, and, as the United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) obituary described him, the person who placed the environment on the international agenda. Strong chaired the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which created UNEP, with himself as its first Executive Director. Strong subsequently chaired the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which resulted in the setting up of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As UNEP director, Strong had earlier organised the first international expert group meeting on climate change that led to the founding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Strong described himself with characteristic candour as ‘a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology’. The IPCC was structured, from its inception, to focus principally on anthropogenic causes of climate change, and it has therefore largely ignored extensive scientific evidence that Earth’s climate is mainly governed by the sun and Earth’s orbit around it.
What Strong built institutionally, the Rockefeller network funded intellectually. The same dynasty whose Standard Oil fortune created the petroleum economy bankrolled, through various philanthropic vehicles, the research programmes that would mandate its dismantling. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced its divestment from fossil fuels in 2014, a political signal and a portfolio decision positioning the fund’s capital for the ‘green energy transition’ it helped to engineer. Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund both contributed to Ben Caldecott’s Stranded Assets Programme at the Oxford Smith School, which provided the academic legitimation for Carbon Tracker’s 2011 concept of ‘unburnable carbon’: the claim that the majority of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground, stranding trillions in existing asset valuations, and redirecting capital flows into new financial instruments managed by the same institutional players.
In 2015, Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of England, addressed Lloyd’s of London and declared climate change a ‘tragedy of the horizon’ which requires mandatory disclosure of carbon exposure across all investment portfolios. This was regulatory pressure applied in a direction that would generate enormous fee income for the financial sector in managing the mandated capital reallocation. The carbon markets that Kyoto (1997) and Paris (2015) created are not, in any meaningful sense, environmental instruments. They are derivatives markets: carbon credits are certificates representing the right to emit a tonne of CO₂, traded, bundled, hedged, and speculated upon by the same institutions that packaged mortgage-backed securities before 2008. The voluntary carbon market alone surpassed two billion dollars annually by 2024, with projections of fifty billion by 2030. The energy dynasties did not resist decarbonisation. They engineered it, financed the science that legitimated it, and positioned themselves to profit from every stage of the transition.
Carbon dioxide is the ideal instrument for global governance — not because of its atmospheric properties, but because of its unique molecular relationship to energy use. Every joule derived from fossil fuel combustion produces a measurable quantity of CO₂. To regulate CO₂ is to regulate energy, and to regulate energy is to regulate the totality of economic and social life.
Veblen’s dream of a technically administered civilisation, frustrated by democratic politics for a century, finds in carbon regulation its perfect incarnation. The IPCC provides the scientific authority. Strong and the UN built the institutional architecture. The Rockefeller network supplied the capital, having funded the UN, the Club of Rome, the Stockholm Conference, much of the early climate science, and, as the meticulous research of Jacob Nordangaard documents, over 900 climate and environmental campaigning NGOs.
The Propagandistic Lie that CO₂ is a Pollutant
Carbon dioxide is the molecule on which all photosynthesis, and hence all life, depends because it is the primary input to the carbon fixation process through which plants, algae, and cyanobacteria build organic matter from sunlight. Commercial greenhouse operators pump CO₂ to concentrations of 1,000–1,500 parts per million, roughly three to four times the current atmospheric level, specifically because plant growth, photosynthetic efficiency, and drought tolerance all improve with elevated CO₂ concentrations, as Sherwood Idso and Bruce Kimball documented extensively in the early 1980s. Current atmospheric CO₂ levels are approximately 420 ppm in the northern hemisphere summer. Geologic records show that this is one of the lowest levels of atmospheric CO₂ in the past 600 million years. Through most of the Mesozoic era, when complex terrestrial life flourished and diversified, CO₂ concentrations ranged from 1,000 to 4,000 ppm. The designation of CO₂ as a pollutant derives not from chemistry or biology but from the 2007 United States Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, a legal ruling that classified CO₂ as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act. A judicial ruling is not a scientific finding.
The IPCC’s central claim is that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions have perturbed the carbon cycle sufficiently to drive global warming since 1870. This claim rests on a crucial sleight of hand regarding the scale of the carbon cycle. Natural gross CO₂ fluxes — from ocean outgassing, soil respiration, plant decomposition, and volcanic activity — amount to approximately 750–800 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year. Human emissions are approximately 37 gigatonnes per year: roughly 4–5% of the natural gross flux. The IPCC claims that the carbon cycle was in ‘approximate equilibrium’ before industrialisation began; that industrial CO₂ emissions represent an additional quantity to which natural sinks cannot respond; and hence that industrial emissions are responsible for the atmospheric increase in CO₂ since the 1950s recorded at Mauna Loa. But as we have seen the lockdowns of 2020 provided an unprecedented natural experiment to test that account, and falsified it. In 2020, natural CO₂ emissions overwhelmed the anthropogenic decline in CO₂ emissions in 2020-21, and this indicates that they always do given that humans produce just 5% of natural emissions. It is therefore scientific misinformation – a lie – to claim that human emissions of CO₂ are responsible for currently increasing levels of atmospheric CO₂. The ice core record compounds the falsehoods in the IPCC’s second and core axiomatic claim – that atmospheric CO₂ precedes and amplifies temperature change. Fischer and colleagues, analysing the Vostok ice core, demonstrated that CO₂ changes at glacial terminations lag temperature changes by several hundred years rather than preceding them. The analysis by Caillon and colleagues in Science, fixed the CO₂ lag at 800 ± 200 years, using argon isotope ratios in ice bubbles as an independent temperature proxy. If CO₂ drives temperature, CO₂ must rise first. In the ice core record, temperature rises first and CO₂ follows hundreds of years later. This means CO₂ changes at glacial-interglacial transitions are a consequence of warming, principally through ocean outgassing as sea surface temperatures rise, rather than a cause of it. This directly contradicts the causal chain on which the entire edifice of climate science and related climate and energy policies rests.
Fundamental to the anthropogenic climate science narrative is the claim of Earth’s ‘climate sensitivity’ to a doubling of pre-industrial CO₂. The statistic around which all GCMs are built is ‘Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity’ which is estimated at between 1.5°C and 4.5°C across successive IPCC reports. But this assumption is non-empirical, and hence the models differ wildly in their predictions of future climate states. Even the IPCC acknowledges that it leaves out the most significant global warming gas, which is water vapour, and that the models lack the computing capacity to simulate cloud behaviour, which is a central determinant of surface temperatures, as anyone knows who stands outside on a sunny day.
The Disappearance of the Sun in Climate Science
The IPCC is so enamoured of the claim that human CO₂ emissions are the principal driver of climate change that it assigns solar forcing the risibly low figure of ±1% of global climate change forcing — effectively zero — and assigns 99% of climate variability since 1870 to forcing by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Usoskin and colleagues at the University of Oulu, reconstructing 11,000 years of solar activity from cosmogenic isotopes — beryllium-10 deposited in ice cores and carbon-14 preserved in tree rings, both produced by galactic cosmic ray flux and therefore varying inversely with solar magnetic activity — demonstrated that the twentieth century coincided with the highest sustained level of solar activity in the entire reconstructed record, a period they termed the Modern Grand Maximum. This finding is independently confirmed by Solanki and colleagues in Nature, who showed that the Sun was only as active as in the twentieth century during around 10% of the previous 11,000 years. On Usoskin’s reconstruction, solar activity rose sharply from the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), through the Dalton Minimum (1790–1820), and then steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, peaking around 1990 and declining thereafter. The correlation between reconstructed solar activity and Northern Hemisphere temperature over the Holocene is substantially stronger than the correlation between CO₂ and temperature at decadal and centennial timescales.
The IPCC’s dismissal of solar forcing relies on the assumption that solar output — of light, particles, plasma and radiation, including x-rays — is constant, and that only the gaseous composition of the atmosphere determines what Earth does with it. This assumption is falsified by a century of observations, and contradicted daily by the agencies that monitor the sun for public safety. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center tracks solar wind speed, proton flux, X-ray emissions, and magnetic field strength in real time, minute by minute, because these outputs vary continuously and their variation has documented consequences for power grids, satellite navigation, aviation, and communications. NOAA’s GOES satellites have measured solar X-ray flux every minute since the 1970s, recording flares powerful enough to alter the Earth’s ionosphere within minutes of erupting on the solar surface. As Kopp and Lean acknowledged in the Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, the sun’s total radiant energy varies on every timescale at which it has been measured — from minutes to millennia.
The idea that the sun’s outputs vary insufficiently to influence climatic and other events on Earth originates in the nineteenth-century displacement of catastrophism by uniformitarianism. Uniformitarianism was the English scientific doctrine established by the geologist Charles Lyell, and supported by Charles Darwin, used to displace the catastrophist theory of the French, and especially Georges Cuvier. Despite the clear evidence of catastrophic episodes in the history of life visible in the fossil record, uniformitarianism proposed that natural processes are gradual and constant across deep time rather than abrupt and variable. This scientific revolution led to the nineteenth-century term ‘solar constant’ which was first proposed by Pouillet and Herschel in 1838, who claimed that the sun delivers a fixed, unchanging quantity of energy to Earth. The outmoded idea of a ‘solar constant’ was later replaced by the statistical construct known as Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). TSI is supposedly based on satellite measurements of solar outputs since 1978. But the renaming conceals a deeper problem. TSI measures only the electromagnetic radiation reaching the top of Earth’s atmosphere. It excludes most of the sun’s outputs including the solar wind, plasma, proton flux, X-ray and ultraviolet radiation: it also excludes magnetic field variations that mediate space weather and which are coupled directly to Earth’s climate system. By substituting TSI for the solar constant in their climate models, climate scientists changed the label while preserving the underlying uniformitarian assumption: that the sun’s influence on Earth is a single stable number, and that everything else — the particle streams, the plasma, the geomagnetic interactions — can be ignored. The NOAA satellites that monitor solar X-ray flux minute by minute do so precisely because operational engineers know that assumption is false and the safety of fly by wire aeroplanes, and electrical grid transformers, depends on accurate forecasting of space weather.
Our star – the sun – is currently at the peak of Solar Cycle 25, which is exceeding predictions and delivered a rare double maximum extending through 2025 and 2026. The most visible consequence has been auroras seen far outside their normal polar range: during the G5 geomagnetic storm of May 2024, auroras were recorded as far south as Texas, Florida, the Yucatán Peninsula, and Puerto Rico, driven by coronal mass ejections — vast clouds of magnetised plasma — slamming into Earth’s magnetosphere. These displays are visible evidence of the continuous transfer of solar plasma energy into Earth’s upper atmosphere and, through electromagnetic coupling, into the climate system below.
Against the IPCC’s claim that anthropogenic emissions are warming Earth’s oceans, research published in Scientific Reports establishes a causal link between Total Solar Irradiance and global ocean heat content across multiple ocean basins, operating on timescales from years to decades. Research published in the Journal of Meteorological Research found a significant correlation between solar wind speed and North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, operating through changes in atmospheric dynamics and cloud cover. As of May 2026, the Gulf of Mexico is recording near-record sea surface temperatures — over one degree Celsius above the long-term average for this date. These exceptional temperatures coincide with the most energetically active solar maximum in over two decades which is compounded by the progressive weakening of Earth’s geomagnetic field — the planetary shield, weakening of which allows greater solar and cosmic ray energy to penetrate the upper atmosphere. But the exceptionally warm weather the Gulf Stream is bringing to the UK and Europe at time of writing is being put down to ‘anthropogenic’ climate change while the real causes – a stronger sun and Earth’s weakening magnetic shield against space weather – are totally ignored.
Solar influence does not stop at Earth’s surface. Research published in Scientific Reports and Terrestrial, Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences documents correlations between solar flare activity, geomagnetic disturbances, and seismic events in Earth’s crust — the proposed mechanism being that intense solar activity generates electrical currents deep in fault zones, potentially nudging already-stressed rock toward rupture. Researchers at Kyoto University recently proposed a specific physical pathway by which solar-driven changes in the ionosphere could apply additional electrical forces to fragile crustal fractures, consistent with the timing of the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake. If proton streams and plasma from the sun can provoke earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in Earth’s crust, the claim that they have near-zero impact on Earth’s climate requires rather more justification than the consensus has so far provided.
Henrik Svensmark developed an independent and equally radical challenge to the IPCC’s solar minimalism. His cosmoclimatology hypothesis, set out in a 1997 paper in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, proposed that galactic cosmic ray flux modulates cloud nucleation in Earth’s lower atmosphere, thereby influencing global temperature through solar magnetic activity: when the sun is more active, its magnetic field deflects more cosmic rays, reducing cloud formation and allowing more solar energy to reach the surface; when solar activity declines, cloud cover rises and the planet cools. CLOUD experiments at CERN led by Jasper Kirkby produced evidence consistent with the cosmic ray mechanism for aerosol nucleation. But Svensmark’s work is institutionally marginalised both in IPCC assessment reports, and by major climate journals whose editorial structures are dominated by researchers committed to the anthropogenic CO₂ primacy thesis.
Earth’s geomagnetic field has been weakening progressively for at least two centuries, most dramatically in the South Atlantic Anomaly — a large expanse over the South Atlantic where the geomagnetic field is anomalously weak, leaving the atmosphere exposed to significantly higher fluxes of cosmic rays and energetic solar particles. A weakening geomagnetic field allows greater cosmic ray penetration globally, which, on Svensmark’s hypothesis, would modulate cloud cover and surface temperatures entirely independently of atmospheric CO₂. The aviation industry has been forced to take this environment seriously: the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2025-0228E in response to the radiation environment generated by solar particle events, and the 2008 near-disaster of Qantas Flight 72 has been linked to space weather interactions with computerised flight control systems.
The Temperature Record and Its Discontents
The Hockey Stick reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures, produced by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes and published in Nature in 1998, became the visual centrepiece of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. McIntyre and McKitrick demonstrated that its principal components methodology was biased toward producing hockey-stick shapes regardless of the input data. The Wegman Report’s independent statistical review confirmed the methodological flaw. The Hockey Stick’s suppression of the Medieval Warm Period – the era of Norse settlement in Greenland, wine production in Northern England, and documented agricultural expansion across the North Atlantic, roughly 900–1300 CE – was not incidental. A prominent warm period in the recent pre-industrial past would undermine the claim that twentieth-century warming was uniquely driven by anthropogenic CO₂.
James Hansen’s own 1999 NASA GISS analysis showed the 1930s as the warmest decade in the continental United States, a finding quietly revised in subsequent data updates without methodological transparency. McKitrick and Michaels demonstrated that a significant fraction of the measured warming signal in surface records could be attributed to urban heat island effects, the documented phenomenon whereby cities generate local warmth through the replacement of vegetation with heat-absorbing surfaces, rather than greenhouse gas forcing. Kalnay and Cai reached analogous conclusions. The systematic reduction in the number of weather stations contributing to the global surface temperature record, from over 6,000 in 1970 to fewer than 1,500 by the early 1990s, eliminated rural and high-latitude stations, disproportionately retaining urban stations: fifty per cent of remaining stations are located at airports which are the hottest of urban environments given jet and heat pump exhausts and large areas of exposed concrete and tarmac. Scafetta and colleagues documented how this station attrition artificially inflates the measured warming trend.
Abrupt Climate Change and Its Real Drivers
Ice cores drilled from Greenland and Antarctica document another feature of the historic climate system that the CO₂-centric consensus cannot accommodate: the repeated occurrence of rapid, large-magnitude climate oscillations driven by natural forcing. Analysis of ice cores from Greenland led to the discovery of ‘Dansgaard-Oeschger’ abrupt warming episodes occurring every 1,500 years and named after the Danish glaciologist Willi Dansgaard and the Swiss physicist Hans Oeschger. They identified repeated warming episodes during which Greenland temperatures rose 10–15 degrees Celsius within decades, and then declined before another warming pulse. The physical mechanisms involve reorganisations of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation — the vast ocean conveyor that transports heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic — triggered by changes in freshwater from melting ice, and modulated by solar and cosmic ray variability. Heinrich events are related phenomena: episodes of massive iceberg discharge from the Laurentide Ice Sheet into the North Atlantic, documented as layers of ice-rafted debris on the ocean floor, which disrupted ocean circulation and drove abrupt cooling. Neither Dansgaard-Oeschger events nor Heinrich events are explicable in terms of CO₂ forcing: in the ice core record, CO₂ changes follow temperature changes by hundreds of years rather than preceding them. None of the IPCC-class GCMs are able to replicate these past sudden climate shifts — a conclusion confirmed by a 2023 review in Climate of the Past which found that “no model exhibits D–O-like behaviour under pre-industrial conditions” and that the inability of IPCC models to simulate D-O events raises serious doubts about their reliability for predicting future abrupt climate transitions. Again this is because the axioms built into the models assume the constancy of solar outputs; negligible influence from the sun on ocean temperatures; and maximal influence from human CO₂ emissions.
The manipulation of temperature records, and of scientific data on past climates, and the systematic neglect of present satellite observations of solar variability and its influence on Earth by the IPCC and the climate science mainstream, is beyond explicable in purely scientific terms. The widespread manipulation of climate and Earth and solar data to fit the anthropogenic climate narrative indicates that scientific agencies are expending huge energies promoting a theory of Earth’s atmosphere and climate that they know to be false. In other words, mainstream climate science, and public communications concerning it, fit the standard definition of propaganda, as first theorised by Edward Bernays and subsequently by Jacques Ellul, whose concept of sociological propaganda describes how institutions diffuse a false consensus so thoroughly through education, media, and expert culture that citizens absorb it as common sense rather than as a manufactured claim.
The psychological mechanism by which populations come to defend a false consensus, against their own interests and against mounting counter-evidence, is what Mattias Desmet calls ‘mass formation’: a process in which free-floating anxiety, social isolation, and loss of meaning render large populations vulnerable to the grip of a single totalising narrative, around which critical thinking is suppressed, and hostility is generated toward those who challenge it. Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism (Chelsea Green, 2022) explicitly builds on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in arguing that the defining feature of the totalitarian moment is not the brutality of the state but the willingness of the population to surrender its own judgment and believe the lies promoted by governments, the media and other elements of propaganda promotion. For Desmet this willingness is produced, and the psychological evidence in relation to the anthropogenic climate narrative is the new condition known as ‘climate anxiety’ which is now the subject of a clinical literature.
A 2023 systematic review published in PLOS Climate confirmed that ‘climate anxiety’ is directly influencing reproductive decisions among young adults, while a 2024 study in Lancet Planetary Health found that 52% of respondents aged 16–25 said they were hesitant to have children because of climate change. A Swiss study published in 2024 found a direct causal link between climate anxiety and reduced childbearing motivation among emerging adults, and UK Generations and Gender Survey data from 2022–23 found that Gen Z respondents were significantly more likely to intend to remain childless than earlier generations at the same age, with climate concern among the identified factors.
A propaganda apparatus that persuades young people that the future is uninhabitable enough to forgo having children is eugenicist in its effects. And as it happens key actors in the anthropogenic climate network have a documented history of support for eugenics and population control. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council in 1952, and appointed as its first administrator Frederick Osborn, founder of the American Eugenics Society which the Ford and Rockefeller foundations jointly funded for decades. Maurice Strong, the architect of the IPCC’s institutional structure, chaired the 1972 Stockholm Conference at which he advocated population reduction alongside environmental governance. The Club of Rome, whose Limits to Growth report and model simulation established the catastrophist template for climate science, made the population-reduction agenda explicit in the 1991 publication The First Global Revolution, in which King and Schneider wrote that the threat of global warming was deliberately selected as “a new enemy to unite us” and to advance a global governance and population control programme. The progression from eugenics to population control to climate catastrophism within the same network of institutions and funders is the same project in successive linguistic registers.
‘Climategate’ and the Manipulation of Climate Data
While it is now possible to see in peer reviewed science outlets extensive challenges to the alleged consensus on the anthropogenic origins of modest Earth temperature changes since 1870, it nonetheless remains the case that the IPCC, and mainstream climate science, continue to promote the anthropogenic narrative. The suspicion arises that a great deal of ‘consensus’ maintenance activity must be going on behind the scenes in climate science but hidden from public view. In November 2009, the curtain was drawn aside on this activity when over 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents were leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Their contents disclosed that prominent climate scientists had discussed how to “hide the decline” in a tree-ring proxy temperature record that diverged from instrumental data after 1960 — a divergence raising fundamental questions about the reliability of the proxies used to reconstruct pre-instrumental temperatures. The documents also exposed the suppression of the Medieval Warm Period data in Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick paper, in IPCC assessments, and in peer review processes. Phil Jones, the CRU director, wrote explicitly of his intention to prevent papers that do not support the anthropogenic climate narrative from being cited in, or influencing, IPCC assessment reports.
Official inquiries were conducted in the United Kingdom and the United States into Climategate. All of them exonerated the scientists involved. Ryghaug and Skjølsvold found that the episode was at root a media attack on science by vested interests rather than evidence of problems within the scientific community. Grundmann’s comparative analysis showed the Climategate framing was largely confined to Anglophone media, while continental European outlets treated it as a minor controversy resolved by the inquiries. Fred Pearce, whose detailed reconstruction of the emails was the most thorough, concluded that the inquiries were not designed to examine whether climate science was being purposefully manipulated, but to preserve the institutional legitimacy of the scientists and, by extension, the ‘climate consensus’.
The War Metaphor and the Governance Agenda
In November 2021, at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, then Prince Charles called on world leaders to mount what he described as ‘a vast military-style campaign’ to achieve the energy transition, with trillions of capital mobilised on a ‘warlike footing’. The language of war, emergency, and existential threat is conventional propaganda discourse and in war time it is used by governments to induce citizens to support the suspension of normal deliberative politics and to maintain the necessity of killing and sacrifice. War suspends deliberative norms: it demands unified command, the suppression of dissent, and the deferral of costs whose benefits may never be delivered. Linking climate science and war is an openly propagandist strategy.
Charles’s resort to the war metaphor carries an additional irony. Mark Curtis and Phil Miller document in a Declassified UK investigation how Charles as Prince of Wales had functioned as a ‘de facto high-level salesman for British arms exports’, meeting with ruling families in Gulf states on 95 separate occasions over a decade and facilitating arms deals, including a multi-billion-pound Typhoon jet sale to Saudi Arabia, following a 2014 visit. Such arms sales funded the repression of pro-democracy movements across the region. The anti-corruption campaigner Andrew Feinstein, in testimony and published work, observed that the British royal family had actively promoted arms sales even when corruption and malfeasance had been suspected.
The additional irony to Charles’ invocation of the war metaphor for climate change is that the military-industrial complex is among the largest institutional sources of CO₂ emissions on the planet. The US Department of Defence emitted 59 million metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent in 2017, more than the entire national emissions of Portugal or Sweden, and an accumulated 1.2 billion metric tonnes between 2001 and 2017. But wars and preparations for them are exempt from mandatory emissions reporting as the United States insisted on this exemption in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
The propaganda of environmental emergency coexists, in Charles Windsor’s public biography, with the business of selling weapons to despots, and with a direct financial interest in the ‘energy transition’ he advocates. The Crown Estate, which manages the King’s public property and owns most of Britain’s seabed, reported a net profit of £1.15 billion in 2024-25, of which £1.07 billion derived from offshore wind farm leases; the monarchy receives a Sovereign Grant set at 12% of Crown Estate profits, currently worth £132 million annually. Meanwhile Charles’s personal carbon footprint — generated by private jets, helicopters, numerous homes, and a fleet of large vehicles — has been estimated at 96 times that of an average citizen, placing him in the top one percent of carbon emitters globally.
The Architecture of Climate Technocracy
What connects all that I have documented above – the financial interests, the temperature record manipulation, the suppression of solar science, the CO₂ mythology, Climategate, the war metaphor, the manufactured denier framing – is what Bruno Latour and Michel Callon call an actor-network: a configuration of human and non-human actors, including laboratories, instruments, funding bodies, journals, models, financial instruments, political actors, that stabilises a particular version of reality not through conspiracy but through the networked alignment of interests towards a favoured program of propaganda. The propagandistic operation is complete when the manufactured consensus feels like self-evident truth, when those who question it are experienced as deviant and morally compromised, and those who maintain it as authoritative, disinterested, and virtuous. The governance payoff is post-democratic in character. Net zero targets, carbon pricing regimes, and stranded asset regulations are constructed through expert and executive processes that mostly bypass legislative deliberation. Populations asked to bear the costs through inflated energy bills, deindustrialisation, and the progressive restriction of small business activities, personal mobility, and consumption choices, are not consulted about the trade-offs involved.
The Costs of the ‘Climate Consensus’
The COVID pandemic did not create the template for governance by manufactured emergency. It confirmed that it works. The same mechanisms visible in the ‘climate consensus’ operated in 2020-2022 at a pace that made them legible in ways that decades of slower accumulation in climate science had obscured. Ferguson’s erroneous computer model drove nations into lockdowns just as the IPCC’s erroneous models drive decarbonisation: not because the empirical evidence supports those responses, but because the models, embedded in institutional networks of authority and prestige, are treated as beyond contestation. In both cases, populations subjected to the resulting policies bear huge costs that are never subjected to genuine cost-benefit analysis, because the emergency framing pre-emptively closes the space in which such analysis would normally occur.
I write as someone who inhabited the climate consensus. I left it because in 2020-22 I realised that there were direct parallels on many levels between the constructed emergency of COVID-19 and the alleged emergency of ‘climate catastrophe’. In both cases, there are extensive bodies of rigorous, peer-reviewed science that challenge official versions of ‘the science’. In both cases, actor-networks manufacture scientific consensus by controlling media and public discussion, and ‘flooding the zone’ with disinformation so that the ‘consensus’ version of reality feels like common sense, and challenges to it are deranged. In both cases the ‘consensus’ is not built on observation but on computer simulations which are run on supercomputers maintained by governmental scientific agencies and elite universities, coded by academics and government agency employees with vested interests in models that put academic narrative control and governmental control of populations, and even their thought processes, above genuine scientific debate and democratic deliberation.
The real-world costs of the ‘climate consensus’ are not abstractions. In Britain alone, more than 2,500 people died from cold weather in winter 2024–25, the overwhelming majority of them elderly, living in homes they can no longer afford to heat as energy bills quadrupled in the wake of ‘net zero’ policies and ‘renewable’ energy subsidies. The 2025 removal of winter fuel payments from millions of pensioners just added insult to injury. Across the European Union, 41 million people are unable to adequately heat their homes — 9.2% of the entire population — with rates reaching 19% in Bulgaria and Greece. The average number of excess winter deaths caused by cold homes in the UK runs at over 7,000 annually. These are the people paying the price for a consensus constructed in the boardrooms of the City of London, the conference rooms of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties annual summits of global technocrats.
In the global south the costs are graver still. International Energy Authority data indicates that four in five families across sub-Saharan Africa still cook with wood, charcoal, or dung over open fires, practices that cause over 800,000 premature deaths each year from household air pollution — the majority among women and children. The G7, the World Bank, and the United Nations have, in pursuit of net zero commitments, systematically cut funding and investment in fossil fuel electricity generation in Africa, on the basis that it would accelerate the transition to renewables. Instead it accelerates deaths. The 960 million people in sub-Saharan Africa without access to clean cooking are the human consequence of a governance agenda built on a contested atmospheric theory, enforced by the denier framing, and insulated from accountability by the institutional network this article has traced from Veblen and the Rockefellers to the carbon derivatives markets of the City of London.
I began this article with the atmosphere’s failure to register the largest deliberate reduction in human emissions in history during the Covid lockdowns. There is an analogous governmental and scientific agency failure to register the millions of premature deaths worldwide already resulting from net zero policies built on the alleged ‘climate consensus’. That consensus was constructed with majority funding from the oil and gas industry. Its purposes are to serve corporate, financial, governmental, and technocratic networks by growing their capacities to accumulate wealth while reducing the economic freedoms, and political choices, of ordinary citizens. ‘Anthropogenic climate change’ fits the classic definition of propaganda as power acquired and maintained through multiple and repeated lies.
(Featured Image: “Pollution” by dbakr is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)
