{"id":415356,"date":"2025-11-30T14:32:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:32:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=415356"},"modified":"2025-11-30T14:32:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:32:23","slug":"the-cult-that-academic-climate-change-research-is-trapped-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=415356","title":{"rendered":"The cult that academic climate change research is trapped in"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From The Conservative Woman<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Dr Shane Fudge<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AMY Morin, a psychotherapist and author, argues that a cult is \u2018a group that centres around a shared devotion to a person, belief, or ideology<\/a>. These groups often require intense devotion and loyalty and use manipulation and control to enforce and maintain power\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there was one thing that characterised the year 2020, it was not a global pandemic, it was not forced lockdowns and the loss of liberties and freedoms, but the stark unravelling of a hidden world and the realisation that nothing is as it seems. Governments lie, scientists misinform, and we must always look for an ulterior motive in everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until 2020, I personally believed that climate science, while imperfect, was carried out by well-meaning people who sought objective truth, and that climate lobby groups acted in our best interests and were there to hold governments and corporations to account. I saw through the pandemic, and this realisation that the government could leverage such scale of deception changed for ever the way I looked at the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2006, I graduated from the University of Glamorgan with a PhD in social policy. Breaking into the labour market can be difficult for new graduates. Going outside my intellectual comfort zone became the experience when I was successfully interviewed for a research fellowship in the University of Surrey\u2019s Centre for Environmental Strategy. Created by Professor Roland Clift in 1992, this department was housed in the university\u2019s School of Engineering as part of the shift into interdisciplinary research.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Climate change, we are told, is a \u2018wicked problem\u2019 which requires collaborative thinking, i.e. involving as many different disciplines and stakeholders as possible.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I arrived, the Centre for Environmental Strategy was comprised of working alliances between the economics, sociology, psychology, the environmental sciences and the engineering departments. I was employed to work on a five-year project known as RESOLVE \u2013 Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment. It was led by Professor Tim Jackson and was aimed at capitalising on his extensive track record and burgeoning profile in the area of \u2018sustainable consumption\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The aim of RESOLVE was to explore various pathways in which the role of the citizen consumer might be integrated more directly into the UK government\u2019s expanding environmental policy suite. Successive energy White Papers, particularly since 2003\u2019s Our Energy future:<\/em> Creating a Low Carbon Economy<\/em><\/a>, had already signposted acquiescence with UN climate and sustainability goals. It was envisioned that RESOLVE would transcend supply side i.e. production facing measures to curtail fossil fuels, to shed light on the micro-economics of energy in housing, mobility, and the \u2018embedded carbon\u2019 in products, services, and individual purchasing choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had relatively little knowledge of climate change when I started work at Surrey, but what immediately became apparent was the clear absence of any discussion on counter-narratives or dissenting views on the science of climate change itself. All research was based upon solving problems within this carefully constructed paradigm, one which largely referenced Mann\u2019s \u2018hockey stick\u2019 iconic representation of rising carbon emissions since the 1960s, and 350.org<\/a>\u2019s argument that we are already well past the threshold of GHG emissions in our environment. One has only to consider the draconian measures of our current Net Zero policies to understand the longer-term implications of these arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first few months of my tenure at Surrey, Channel 4 showed \u2018The Great Global Warming Swindle\u2019. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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