The New Priesthood . . .

Other than in the simplest things the crowd is usually wrong.  If you wanted to go to a Celtic game and were totally unfamiliar with Glasgow, the failsafe method would be to follow those with green and white scarves as they grew in numbers towards Parkhead.  But for anything more subtle than that the crowd is a poor leader.

Colin Renfrew in his 1973 book Before Civilisation detailed at length the fierce eleven-year resistance put up by the archaeological establishment to the acceptance of radio-carbon dating, whose conclusions threatened to upturn the apple cart of all their previously accepted theories and render their scholarship obsolete.  For the ordinary archaeologists, one imagines, the work went on much as before, simply unearthing the fragmentary evidence about which the theorists could wind their abstractions.

I remember being in London in 1994 and coming across the most marvellous book on the geology of Europe in an Oxfam bookshop: coffee-table size, scientifically-written, marvellously illustrated with charts and maps, altogether one of the finest presentations of a subject that I had ever come across in my life—and heavy, too.  At that stage I had a son who was a working geologist with the British Geological Society and I bought it for him and carted it home only to have him dismiss it with barely a glance.  ‘That’s all old hat now!’

Now the book had been published within the previous twenty or so years—officially published, if I remember correctly, with a European scientific imprimatur—and written by guy with a barrowful of academic qualifications and honorary titles behind his name.  I wanted my son to take it anyway, because it would have looked well on his shelves, but he dismissed it completely.

Now I am sure that the groundwork within it—the maps and charts and unformatted information—must still have been first class, except that it had been all bundled up in support of a theory that by this stage was out of fashion.

Still, I used to marvel at it—the work that went into writing it, the quality of the paper and the print, the detail of the illustrations, the binding—for, as I say, it was an absolutely beautiful production—yet all in the service of barking up the wrong tree.

The ‘bandwagon effect’ is the name given to the human tendency to believe things purely to the extent that they can be persuaded that other people believe them too.  Basically, it is another version of following the crowd.  And the great stampede at the moment is in the direction of an absolute belief in the truth of climate change.  A belief, so far as the crowd is concerned, backed up by nothing more than what they are told on television.  Time and again, when pressed to justify their belief, the cry goes up ‘but the scientists say it’s so!’

Now scientists aren’t God.  They are ordinary human beings with the same egos and needs and desire to get on as anybody else.  Nor are the primary concerns of academics necessarily to do with truth—as the long war over carbon-dating tends to show.  The vast bulk of scientists and academics are purely production line workers, packaging up what they receive and passing it on, often with little by way of added value.  Original thinkers are comparatively few.  Original thinkers who value truth above all personal considerations are even fewer.

Now archaeology, even with carbon-dating, is not really a science; or not certainly an applied science, which involves the possibility of plotting alternative futures and not just the past.  The technique used in the applied sciences is mainly modelling, which is to do with creating ‘what-if’ computer simulations of potential future outcomes, depending on the different variables you key in.

Now the fact is that modelling, properly done, is a hugely complex undertaking, full of, in Donald Rumsfeld’s words, ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’.  The most seemingly innocuous omissions or changes in data having the potential to change the whole simulation.  Not to mention the possibility of conscious or unconscious bias on the part of an emotionally involved researchers—for as someone said to me recently, ‘no one ever embarked on research without knowing in advance what they wanted to find’

Now as regards the present theory of climate change, I am, as I have said previously, not qualified to judge it. There are certain facts that seem immune to being challenged, such as the ongoing measurements of global warming and the increases in CO2.  The only theory in town at the moment is the one we are all familiar with—there may well be alternative theories, but if there are they are not being publicised.  So in the interim, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with what we have.

The problem is that it is not anymore simply a matter of climate—all sorts of other forces are supporting the current model to the extent that it scratches their own particular itches.  Rather like the disparate elements offering to back Jeremy Corbyn for prime minister so long as he supports a second referendum on Scottish Independence or Brexit or whatever, ancillary supporters of the present climate position include the vegans and the animal rights crowd and the greens, together with those perennial ‘Ministers for Hardship’, the soft and hard Left and their cousins, the modern secular liberals, whose shared underlying drive is a desire to micromanage everyone else’s life down to the very nitty-gritty.

There is also the question as to what extent the cure, as presently outlined, is perhaps worse than the disease.

More later . . .