A February 28 Breitbart article by James Delingpole begins the summary of a recent 2018 paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on how climate science has been manipulated by groupthink, with a foreword by professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Lindzen.  Booker himself is an historian, with a background writing on climate change and energy issues for the past eleven years.  His 123-page paper is well written and thorough, with no confusing charts or difficult technical terminology.

The paper recounts how the climate change "scare" originated with the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin in the 1970s; was spread by an evangelical Christian professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford, who came to head the influential United Kingdom Meteorological Office; and was exploited by a rich Canadian businessman and Marxist, who saw money, power, and opportunity to spread the leftist agenda.  This unholy trinity employed methods of mass psychology to embed the "scare" into a global political consciousness, through a series of United Nations conferences beginning in 1979, culminating in the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988.  The basis of the IPCC was never more than nominally scientific, but its purpose was leftist: to regulate people's lives and transfer wealth from the industrialized world to the less developed.

The information from "Climategate," the release of over 1,000 emails and 3,000 other documents from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU), reflected the shakiness of climate change theory to evidence; a crucial need, nevertheless, to preserve the illusion of "consensus"; and an "irrational and dehumanized" hostility toward anyone expressing any alternate theory.  These are manifestations of efforts to manipulate the "groupthink" discussed by Booker, with reference to the originator of the theory, Irving Janis, in the influential 1972 book Victims of Groupthink.  In summary, "groupthink ... occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of 'mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgement.'"

The Booker paper is likely to provoke a vicious response from the "group" and its affiliates.