Jordan Peterson: Net Zero Alarmism is a Mental Illness

Jordan Peterson has declared that, in his professional opinion, climate doomsayers “are possessed by an ideology much more akin to a psychogenic epidemic than they are purveyors of any information remotely scientific”. Writing in the Telegraph, the renowned psychologist suggests climate alarmism is something more like an ideological or religious movement than a scientific one. Here’s an excerpt.

In 2023, I was sentenced in Canada by the Ontario College of Psychologists and Behavioural Analysts to an unspecified period of professional ‘re-education’ for what has been deemed my unprofessional conduct. If I refused to comply, then the college indicated its duty to revoke my professional licence as a clinical psychologist.

I said that I would comply, although insisting – despite the college’s entreaty – that I would make every detail of that re-education painfully public.

Part of my unprofessionalism was apparently illustrated in the submission of the entire transcript by a random complainant to said college of a conversation I had with Joe Rogan on his podcast, accompanied by the allegation that I had stepped out of my lane as a psychologist.

How? By daring to share my opinion that the economic models purporting to indicate catastrophic future danger caused by the apparently impending climate change apocalypse were false and unreliable and by implying something that requires the further analysis this column offers: that there are non-scientific, indeed psychological, reasons that such models were and are generated and promoted in the first place.

The complainant had never received any professional services from me, let it be noted. Furthermore, the ‘re-education’ has never been scheduled, despite my agreement to submit to the process, and their publicly stated decision to proceed, because the college appears unable to find anyone at all anywhere willing to act as said re-educator.

Why am I telling you this? First, because the anecdote provides evidence for the genuine social and psychological danger in speaking out against the pretensions of the mad green mob; and second, because the claims that climate change terror is scientifically justified have to be enforced by entrenched propagandistic bureaucratic inquisitors rather than proved scientifically and assessed through genuine discussion in the public arena.

And with that, on to the real show.

Why might a psychologist be qualified to discuss issues of climate change, anyway? It isn’t as if my opinion on psychological matters is appropriate, say, when it comes to the validity of Einstein’s equations describing general relativity. It is therefore clearly the case that there are issues in the scientific realm that my education and ability should make me cautious in assessing as a professional, speaking in the public domain.

But there are important – nay, crucial – differences between the mathematics of advanced physics and the doomsaying climate apocalypse narrative. The former has had the validity of its claims demonstrated by passing every crucial test of prediction for a century; the latter has failed continually when put to the test – so much so that ‘global warming’ turned suddenly into ‘climate change’ at some time in the last decade or so because the former phraseology proved untenable both conceptually and practically.

Here is the crucial question: is the climate apocalypse narrative just a scientific theory? Or is it instead a system of belief, unmoored from the objective world, with essentially psychological factors playing the primary role in its initial formulation, current maintenance and widespread dissemination? If the former, then I’m out of my wheelhouse as a commentator, and deserve, arguably, to be called on it. If the latter, however, then I am in my true element, as a psychologist, trained in the analysis of belief – and, more importantly, ethically bound as such to indicate falsehood in conceptualisation where I see it.

And, with regard to that distinction: I have come to conclude, after much detailed consideration (informed by my professional training and experience as researcher and clinician), that the climate doomsayers are possessed by an ideology much more akin to a psychogenic epidemic than they are purveyors of any information remotely scientific.

Might I point out, as well: even if I’m wrong (and I’m not) such a suggestion from a credible psychologist is at least worthy of evaluation as an alternative explanation for our current cultural, political, economic and psychological predicament.

The scientific claim is that the evidence for cataclysmic climate change is undeniable. The counterclaim, psychologically, is that those who make such a statement are acting out the dictates of a set of ideas that are not scientific, but much more something akin to an ideological or even religious movement, unrecognised though that may be to the holders of the doctrine.

Read Dr Peterson’s full analysis of the “psychological” phenomenon of apocalyptic climate alarmism here.