Claim: Margaret Mead began the 'climate change hoax'.

Or rather, Margaret Mead, a proven liar, led scientists onto the broad, wide road of manipulating public fears.

Apr 04, 2023

I am looking at the claim that Margaret Mead began the Climate Change hoax today.

What I believe she actually did was really far more serious – she led scientists down the path of lying for a ‘good cause’ - essentially, the pathway where the end justifies the means, into the realm where exaggerating evidence is acceptable, if you are trying to motivate the general public into doing what you believe they ought to be doing.

Yes, Margaret Mead was a liar.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote “Coming of Age in Samoa” in 1928, a book that made the claim that Samoan society was a ‘sexual paradise’, where girls gave themselves freely to men, and rape and domestic violence simply didn’t happen.

The cover of one of the editions of Coming of Age in Samoa; aiming for the popular academic soft-porn market of the 1950s.

This book became very popular, particularly because many intellectuals of the early twentieth century felt that greater sexual freedom was a good thing, and its influence continued well into the 1960s, bearing the fruit of sexual liberation in the late 1960s.

The only problem was that the study was basically fraudulent; Margaret Mead had cherry picked her statements to support her prior belief that sexual freedom is a good thing, and had suppressed evidence that didn’t support this thesis.

She lied, in other words.

It was another anthropologist, John Freeman, who went to Samoa in the 1960s and interviewed Samoan men as well as Samoan women, and exposed Margaret Mead’s research as fraudulent and inaccurate.

A third anthropologist, Martin Orans, went through the evidence that Margaret Mead had twisted the facts in her research in his book, “Not Even Wrong, Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans.” He had examined Margaret Mead’s research notes, collated them with the Samoan census, and compared these facts to Margaret Mead’s statements in “Coming of Age in Samoa”.

Orans documents numerous examples of Margaret Mead twisting the facts to suit her purposes and comes to the conclusion that Freeman’s criticisms were correct.

Orans’ book, at the end, also contains a short “mea culpa,” where he asks how so many anthropologists could have been taken in by her dubious research. He admits that anthropologists accepted Mead’s dubious studies because they wanted them to be true, the greatest logical fallacy of all in science: confirmation bias.

We believed that a more permissive sexual code would be of benefit to all of us. But most important of all, her findings were a coup for the position that culture is more important than biology. Such a finding was supportive of solving social problems by social change in opposition to the position that such problems are rooted in biology; it was peripherally a blow against racism since it tended to diminish the linkage between biology and behaviour. All of these perceived benefits were made especially pertinent because the message was delivered in a charming fashion. Had Mead provided the opposite message we no doubt would have much more readily noted its profound inadequacy. Those of us who went along with the work did so because, for us, she was on the side of the angels and delivered her message so effectively.

And we know that peer pressure is a dreadful motivator - if any anthropologists had doubts, considering Margaret Mead’s fame and enormous cultural influence in the twentieth century, for the sake of their careers I am sure they kept their thoughts to themselves.

https://archive.org/details/notevenwrongmarg0000oran/mode/2up

The World Population Conference 1974

Margaret Mead attended the World Population Conference in 1974, in Bucharest, She came back convinced that Population Growth was the most pressing problem facing the world, and the greatest threat to the future, and that the world faced a choice between feeding people and protecting the environment.

The Atmosphere, Endangered and Endangering. Conference held in 1975

https://ia801607.us.archive.org/0/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.132143/2015.132143.The-Atmosphere-Endangered-And-Endangering_text.pdf

Margaret Mead organised the Atmosphere Endangered and Endangering conference in 1975, and began the conference with a speech that became the preface of the above document. In this speech she identified the need for a “law of the air”, and made this astonishing statement, in which she recommends that scientists ought to all agree with one another (an idea that is completely anathema to the scientific method), in order that they may properly put the fear of climate catastrophes and overpopulation into the populace:

What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats.

Note that “artificial but effective warnings” are basically lies. Today, we have become so used to propaganda and lies that the false, repeatedly failed, prophecies of the climate crusaders are simply accepted and never even challenged by the mainstream media - and in fact, we have also come to accept lying about scientific consensus as a matter of course. In fact, consensus is science, in the minds of many, today.

It is not.

Science can only thrive where scientists are allowed to be skeptical, and disagree with one another.

On Margaret Mead’s dishonesty

I very much doubt that Margaret Mead set out to deceive others at the beginning of her career as an anthropologist; I suspect at the start it was more a matter of occasionally cherry-picking facts, considering only the data that supported her thesis, and ignoring the data that didn’t fit in with what she wanted to say. “After all,” she might have said, “It must be true; the truth is self-evident, so I’m not really being dishonest; anyway, I’m doing this for all the right reasons.” - which justification essentially is ‘the end justifies the means’, expressed in different words.

This is of course a warning to those of us who hold onto cherished theories of any kind that we are invested in proving: it is very easy to ignore certain facts and consider only those facts that fit our theory. Confirmation bias is an ever-present danger for anyone with a passion for truth. Indeed, a true scientist is always bending over backwards to consider the evidence against their hypothesis; only until there is no evidence that contradicts the hypothesis does one have a theory. The famous physicist Richard Feynman’s explanation of what science in a 1964 lecture is worth watching actually, and he also makes the point that a theory can only be disproven, never proven. Despite Feynman’s disdain for the ‘soft’ sciences (particularly psychology), I believe this applies to the true journalist and historian as well as the true philosopher, for journalism and history and philosophy should also be engaged in forming hypotheses and testing them against reality.

And in the long term, sloppiness about truth in small things may lead one to become not only sloppy about truth, but an out and out liar, or even someone who leads others into lying, as Margaret Mead did, in the end. Taking an eternal perspective, becoming a liar is not a good outcome.

Arrhenius

And I will just make the point that while Margaret Mead was the one who came up with the idea that scientific elites should use increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 to induce fear and panic in the populace in order to inculcate social control, many people say that the scientist Arrhenius, who lived in the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, was the first person to put forward the hypothesis that rising levels of CO2 might cause global warming and the greenhouse effect.

This claim is not so straightforward as it sounds.

In the book, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, James Rodger Fleming explains:

More recently, Arrhenius has been lauded as the father of the theory of the greenhouse effect, even of global warming. One author claimed that "Arrhenius had enough spectroscopic information to estimate that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air could warm the world by four to six degrees," that "the industrial output of carbon dioxide had already reached a level comparable to the amount that circulated naturally," and that Arrhenius had "discovered" the greenhouse effect in 1896. All three statements are misleading and incorrect.

Apparently Arrhenius did not have spectrographic equipment of sufficient quality to measure CO2 levels. Also, Arrhenius followed his contemporary Hogbom in believing that the levels of 19th century industrial CO2 were infinitesimal compared to the CO2 emissions from volcanoes and natural processe.s

By 1904, Arrhenius had become concerned by the rapid increase in anthropogenic carbon emissions. In his article of 1896, he had cited Hogbom's figure of five hundred million tons for the annual combustion of coal. Since then the amount had risen rapidly, and by 1904 it had reached almost nine hundred million tons. Arrhenius found it significant that "the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere may by the advances of industry be changed to a noticeable degree in the course of a few centuries." After reviewing new research on the carbon cycle by Chamberlin and others, he concluded that "the percentage of carbonic acid in the air must be increasing at a constant rate as long as the consumption of coal, petroleum, etc., is maintained at its present figure, and at a still more rapid rate if this consumption should continue to increase as it does now." Arrhenius considered it likely that in future geological ages the Earth would be "visited by a new ice period that will drive us from our temperate countries into the hotter climates of Africa." On the time scale of hundreds to thousands of years, however, he thought that burning fossil fuels could help prevent a rapid return to the conditions of an ice age, and could perhaps inaugurate a new carboniferous age of enormous plant growth

So it is to be noted that while Arrhenius originally concerned about the amount of CO2 being emitted, he ultimately came to the conclusion that the net effect of CO2 would likely be beneficial.

By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind. -Svante Arrhenius (1906)

As Fleming puts it:

By 1904 Arrhenius had suggested that increasing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels might be beneficial, making the Earth's climates warmer and "more equable," stimulating plant growth, and providing more food for a larger population.

And this seems to be what is happening.

This chart shows the change in leaf area from 1982 to 2015 according to satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments.