National Academies and the (non) Greenhouse Gas Effect: Part 6

This article summarizes the brilliant essay of Marjorie Mazel Hecht that offers one of the most compelling insights into the back-story of how a clique of U.S. academics sold a Malthusian population control scare story.* Their aim: to use man-made global warming as the front to introduce drastic worldwide population control.

Hecht’s piece, “1975 `Endangered Atmosphere’ Conference: Where the Global Warming Hoax Was Born” identifies that the key conspirators of the climate hoax came together to formulate their ideas at a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Influential anthropologist Margaret Mead organized the event. [1] Mead was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1974 but had a shadowy past. Her 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud. Thus Mead was “well qualified” to form a new school of anti-population charlatans under her tenacious and bullying tutelage. Among her team was climate con artist Stephen Schneider, biologist George Woodwell, and President Barack Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren. All were “students” of Malthusian mad man Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.[2] 

In a 1974 Science magazine editorial Mead successfully forged a narrative that her Population Conference had settled the issue that population growth was very bad for the environment. From Hecht’s well-crafted article we learn that the U.S. National Institutes of Health: the John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences were all in with Mead from the start. With a growing team Mead had the beating heart of a new “science” (climatology) to back up the scares. The goal was simple: policy-makers would be presented with such compelling “evidence” that they had to act, and fast, on man-made global warming.

All the bright and hopeful “Atoms for Peace” ideas of Franklin Roosevelt and of Dwight Eisenhower for a universal program of cheap, clean nuclear power to raise the living standards of all peoples was swept away. Suddenly “nuclear” became a dirty word. In its place Mead’s 1975 climate conference set a new agenda: world nations were to bow down to a new “Law of the Atmosphere” intended to stunt human scientific advance and industrial wealth creation for the masses.

Mead’s conference spin was that unless all citizens bowed down to these new environmental laws then “the whole planet may become endangered.” Mead proclaimed “I have asked a group of atmospheric specialists to meet here to consider how the very real threats to humankind and life on this planet can be stated with credibility and persuasiveness before the present society of nations begins to enact laws of the air, or plan for ‘international environmental impact statements.’ “

Working closely with her co-organizer William W. Kellogg (a climate scientist from RAND and later NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research), Mead declared they had won over a consensus of scientists. Then a year later Kellogg and Mead published a book selling the idea that each nation ”should control carbon dioxide emissions.” [3]

Climate scientist Stephen Schneider typified this new generation of activist “scientists” when he brazenly told Discover magazine in 1989: “To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”

Schneider was a close friend of The Population Bomb‘s Paul Ehrlich and held a prominent role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). John Holdren, now Obama’s science guru, co-authored several articles and books with Ehrlich. Holdren’s stated goal was reduce the population of the United States from its current 302 million down to only 150 million people.

On Mead’s team was also prominent environmentalist, Dr. James Lovelock, best known as the creator of the Gaia thesis, which views the Earth as a whole as a living biological being. But Lovelock famously jumped ship in an interview with MSNBC in which he admitted he and his colleagues had been “alarmist.”

Kellogg’ and the others ramped up the sense of urgency and pending catastrophe: “To ignore the possibility of such changes is, in effect, a decision not to act.“ Then Woodwell’s presentation, “The Impact of Environmental Change on Human Ecology,” sounded the Chicken Little cry, “The fact that the toxic effects of human activities are spreading worldwide and reducing the structure of the biota is an indication that human activities at present exceed the capacity of the biosphere for repairing itself.”

*This article is one of a series on this subject. The full set are found as follows: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part 6

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[1] Margaret Mead, “World Population: World Responsibility,” Science,Sept. 27, 1974 (editorial), Vol. 185, No. 4157.

[2] The Population Bomb, published in 1968 repeated the discredited argument of the British East India Company’s Parson Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that population increases geometrically while food supply increases only arithmetically. Malthus was proved wrong by the development of fertilizers and scientific farming, industrialization, advances in biochemistry.

[3]The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering, Margaret Mead, Ph.D. and William W. Kellogg, Ph.D., eds. Fogarty International Center Proceedings No. 39, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, DHEW Publication No. [NIH] 77-1065).