The Man Who Didn't Invent Climate Change

Never one to back down from a challenge to my skepticism, I’ve been looking into climate conspiracies, and no, not the well-documented conspiracy by Big Oil, following the playbook shared with Big Tobacco, to sow doubt about what is now one of the strongest consensuses in modern science. Instead, I was encouraged to "look into" the conspiracy theories that campaign paid for, by asking: who was supposedly “behind” the global warming movement? Spoiler: it sure looks to me like the culprit was the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.

My conclusion may disappoint this challenger, whose prime suspect was, I suspect, Maurice Strong. If your response to that revelation is “who?”, kudos for not having wasted any of your valuable time down this particular rabbit hole of climate conspiracy nonsense. Strong, for those so blissfully enlightened as to not know, was a seemingly earnest and unassuming Canadian businessman and diplomat who was somewhat influential in the formation of international environmental policy from the early ‘70s to the mid-‘90s. What he was not, despite the claims of contrarian pseudo-journalist Christopher Booker (who, coincidentally, also denied the science linking passive smoking to cancer) and other less accomplished denialists, was a socialist, a lifelong crusader for world government, or “the man who invented climate change”.

Strong has been linked to the Club of Rome (CoR), a think tank, perhaps justifiably criticized as amateurish and alarmist, which was formed by the rich and powerful to, in my opinion, try and ward off the seemingly imminent collapse of the system that had made them rich and powerful by smoothing off its rougher edges. And although clear confirmation of his membership is lacking, Strong certainly shared similar sustainability goals, possibly for similar reasons; raising himself to multi-millionaire status from Great Depression poverty through entrepreneurship in the Alberta oil patch, he was an avowed capitalist who believed it the best system to fulfil the public need, if its excesses were properly moderated.

Strong’s alleged “invention” of climate change came, according to Booker, in the early ‘80s through championing, for his own nefarious purposes, the cause of “a tiny group of international meteorologists.” As confirmation, some, not Booker though as he never seemingly feels the need to evidence his claims, point to cherrypicked lines from the beginning and end of a single passage on page 115 of CoR’s 259-page 1991 report “The First Global Revolution” which states they “came up with” the idea that global warming could unite humanity against the real enemy, humanity itself.

The interpretation of “came up with” here to mean “invented out of thin air,” however, requires skipping the middle of that passage which clarifies that climate change does constitute a common threat, but it is not the real enemy, rather the human action that drives it is. Also skipped is the advocacy for global governance, which the report (page 113, for example) and Strong clarify means international co-operation, democratic participation, and pluralist consensus, not one world government, which Strong dismisses as infeasible.

Ironically, as historian Prof Cyrus Mody notes, it was this consensus-building approach, rather than any authoritarian control, which made Strong and the CoR prime fodder for conspiracist claims of hidden agendas. A network of rich and powerful supporters, closed-door meetings of these elites in remote locales, and public positions severely compromised by the requisite backroom deals, all raised somewhat justifiable suspicion; suspicion that was further fuelled by the overlap between environmental advocacy and business interests. Curiously, the same scrutiny isn’t applied to Booker and his own ties with the at-least-equally shady Rusty Razor-winning Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and its Big Oil backers.

The clearest refutation of all this, however, is that far from being fringe meteorology as Booker claimed, climatology was, by the ‘80s, a well-established science. The greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO₂ had been recognized for over a century, and a growing body of empirical measurements and increasingly sophisticated climate models confirmed the role of human activity in driving global warming. Clearly, Strong and the CoR were responding to the emerging scientific consensus, not inventing it, and despite the public doubt bought and paid for by those with the most to lose, research since has only continued to refine and reinforce that consensus.

Our lockdown-live discussion with Dr John Cook on climate change denial.