A wild goose chase

The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational agency to combat the selfish multinationals and greedy consumerism that threatened to destroy the planet.

Meanwhile science, once a field for open contests between falsifiable hypotheses, was increasingly a creature of government, a wartime development accentuated by the race for technological leadership in the Cold War.