Now that there is much more of a parity in the debate between sceptics and alarmists, it easier to compare the types of organisations from which each view stems. And it has struck me that overwhelmingly, it is the large organisations, and amongst them, the multinationals (whether media of e.g. UN or charities) who overtly express support for global warming alarmism, but it is the small, even individual people who express scepticism.

Could this simply be that “social” structures are more likely to support causes for the “good us all”, whilst individuals are more likely to express their personal interests? Or could it be that larger organisations are run by people who are “organisation machines”, people with very little contact with the practical reality of day to day living, who move so often they can’t see the climate isn’t changing, so they see the world “through” other people and organisations, relying for their view of “reality”on the “experts” and their graphs, charts etc.

Or is it some kind of “natural selection”, whereby the system of applying to grants selects out those “scientists” who are most persuasive to the organisational machines that dole out our money by way of grants to fund “science” so that there has evolved a super race of “scientists” (or at least there has evolved a culture/way of thinking) which is uniquely adapted to persuading big organisations out of their money?

Perhaps it is simply that “global” warming, is a global issue, that is more attuned to the “global” nature of big organisations. Perhaps it is that the pragmatic people who form the majority of sceptics don’t do well in the “spin machine” culture of modern large global organisations.

Whatever the reason, it’s long been suspected that the sceptics have been a nightmare for the big alarmist propaganda organisations, who can’t understand how the sceptics have been so effective. Being organisational “cogs in the machine”, they simply cannot (or don’t want to) believe such an effective campaign could have been run without a massive, well-paid, highly resourced publicity machine behind it. But having tried to find the “head of the hydra” they have instead found nothing but poorly resourced individualistic people who are as apt to argue with each other as the warmists.

As a sceptic I’m not going to be shy of saying that the world needs more sceptics (but other sceptics will no doubt disagree), but could it be that the lack of scepticism in large companies is the cause of many of our problems? Take e.g. the global economic banking crisis. I simply could not believe that people would continue to invest in a market that was bound to drop by around 10%. It was so patently obvious to me that I persuaded a friend to get out of the banking sector into something less stressful a good year before the crisis hit.

But aren’t all these “bubbles” from global warming to banking to the millennium bug and the housing market, all the result of a lack of scepticism?