As a celebrated historian, Professor Naomi Oreskes is interested in the origin of things - where ideas start from, what drives them and ultimately who propagates them.

Oreskes, Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego, has just arrived in Australia on a whistle-stop speaking tour promoting her new book, co-authored with Erik Conway, titled Merchants of Doubt - How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming.

The book, five years in the writing, ultimately concludes that much of the world's scepticism on climate change - whether that be over the validity or certainty of the science of climate change, its causes or the need to act - is chiefly driven by a paranoid ideological fear of socialism and an unbending faith and belief in free-markets.

Put simply, free-market think-tanks such as the George C Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, The Science and Public Policy Institute and the Why-Can't-You-Just-Leave-us-Alone-While-We-Make-Oodles-of-Cash Institute (not a real institute) don't like industry to have to be held accountable.

Oreskes spoke to the ABC's Lateline program on this brand of scepticism which also drove shoulder-shrugs over acid rain, tobacco smoke and ozone depletion.

Says Oreskes, "It's part of this whole ideological program of challenging any science that could lead to government regulation, because it's part of an ideological conviction that all regulation is bad, that any time the government steps in to ‘protect' us from harm, that we're on the slippery slope to socialism, and this the ideology that you see underlying a kind of almost paranoid anti-communism. So even after the Cold War is over, these people are seeing reds under the bed." 

The book, five years in the writing, ultimately concludes that much of the world's scepticism on climate change - whether that be over the validity or certainty of the science of climate change, its causes or the need to act - is chiefly driven by a paranoid ideological fear of socialism[.]

The UN narrative says that developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere must atone for their "climate sins" of generating wealth and comfortable lifestyles using fossil fuels, by scaling back their economies through a process of "Contraction" and then transferring much of that wealth to developing nations, to bring them up to the new lowered expectations of the developed nations, described as "Convergence. "

Thus will there ensue a just and equitable Global Community of Nations, all having equal shares of the so-called Global Commons of the atmosphere and the oceans and living sustainable low-tech life styles in a state of Climate Justice, guaranteed by the UN World Government. It has been aptly described by Professor Fred Singer as "taking money from the poor in rich countries and giving it to the rich in poor countries."

Under this UN vision, consumption of everything will be controlled and rationed, globally, even to the point of individual allowances for energy use and carbon dioxide emissions.