Science, like any other calling, has its frauds, fools, fads and fashions. Fraud such as Piltdown Man and probably the greatest, Gupta’s palaeontological Himalayan hoax, are well known. Such frauds take decades to expose. At times, mistakes not detected by editors and reviewers of peer-reviewed scientific journals appear (e.g. cold fusion).

Physicist Alan Sokal was familiar with the rigours of publishing hard science and was suspicious that some humanities journals published any old fashionable leftist tripe as long as it was deconstructionist. His 1994 publication Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity was published in Social Text. The title was a dead give-away. The paper was a blend of new age claptrap, hard sciences nomenclature and post-modernist deconstruction and was replete with discredited and concocted references. The author exposed the hoax which was not detected by editors, reviewers or readers.

Inspired by Sokal, in one year Boghossian et al. wrote twenty fake papers submitted to ostensibly respectable peer-reviewed social sciences journals using fashionable jargon to make ridiculous conclusions on gender, queer, transphobia, rape, grievance and fat studies. Seven refereed papers were published, seven were in various stages of review and six were rejected and exposure of fooling the fools with fashionable fads was by the authors. Both examples clearly showed how minimal scholarship underpins some of the social sciences.

Other areas of science were captured by those pushing a political line. The peasant Tofim Lysenko rose through the ranks of Soviet political bureaucracy to direct agricultural policy. He rejected genetics in favour of his own pseudoscientific ideas on grain propagation which led to the starvation of tens of millions of people. Contrarian Mendelian geneticists had their careers destroyed, were sent to the gulags and some were killed. It was only after the death of Stalin that Lysenko was discredited and it took Soviet agriculture at least four decades to recover. Lysenkoism is alive and well in Australia as shown by the dismissal of Peter Ridd and the fact that many eminent scientists such as Bob Carter were pilloried by their own institution.

Scientific ideas change, evolve and are refined over time. Once we all knew the planet was flat, that the planets and the Sun rotated around the Earth, that the atom was the smallest unit in nature, that the electron was the smallest particle known and that life was created 6,000 years ago after which there was a global flood 4,000 years ago. In my field, it took six decades before the concept that continents move was accepted. Now we measure the rate of continental drift but still argue about the mechanism.

The fashionable climate change fad has stimulated integrated interdisciplinary science on the sun, supernoval eruptions, tectonism and cycles on climate despite the capturing of scientific journals, research institutes, research grant organisations and professional societies by ideologiocal climate zealots. One has to look hard to find this science but it exists as veiled papers in mainstream journals. Chemistry, glaciology, biology, geology, agriculture, astronomy, palaeontology and oceanography all show that carbon dioxide is currently a trace gas in the atmosphere, is plant food, drives all life on Earth and has nothing to do with climate change.

A career in science requires research grants. No funds are forthcoming if the research is politically incorrect. The system now forces some scientists to be untruthful. This destruction of free thinking will cost us dearly. In my experience of being a chair and head of departments for three decades and sitting on the Australian, German and Swedish research councils, I have seen a decline in scholarship and ethics resulting from the politicisation of science.

Large teams of scientists rarely achieve what an isolated left-field outcast scientist can achieve. Many published scientific papers are only read by a few people and many scientists are funded for trivial research that can only be described as hobby science. We taxpayers fork out our hard-earned cash for our own hobbies yet many scientists want both their hobby and salary funded by the taxpayer.

I’ve had a long correspondence with a climate catastrophist from the Scott Polar Institute at Cambridge. Despite asking a very simple question many times and in different ways, I have never received an answer. The question is simple: ‘Can you please cite half a dozen scientific papers that demonstrate human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming?’ He tried feeding the chooks with all sorts of obscure papers (which I read) and promoted his own two voluminous books on climate change but never answered my question. He ducked, weaved and bobbed. I hounded him for a few landmark papers in climate science that demonstrate human emissions drive climate change. Not one paper was cited by a person who is considered a world expert on climate change in a prestigious institute. His latest contribution in a newsletter was entitled, ‘Net zero is not enough. The urgent need for negative emissions.’ It was assumed that human emissions drive climate change yet there was no validation of this assumption. This was the work of an unbalanced zealot. I found exactly the same response from one of Australia’s former chief scientists.

The whole catastrophic climate change caper is a house of cards. No one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive climate change. Only the contrary. If the basis of human-induced climate change has never been demonstrated, why is there a need to change transport and electricity systems that have taken more than a century to build? The modern internal combustion engine is a wonderful feat of engineering as are fuel-efficient quiet jet aeroplanes and coal-fired power generators. Fertiliser and food production, food distribution and commodities production have never been more efficient. Why would I eat bugs and not a healthy steak? Fossil fuels have given us longer lives, better health, wealth and more freedoms. Why reverse this trend?

There is no necessity to dismantle reliable efficient energy systems with inefficient unreliable expensive foreign-owned electricity systems. Why should Australia replace cheap reliable energy systems using locally acquired commodities with expensive imported weather-dependent systems that destroy prime food-producing land, kill wildlife, destroy forests, create unemployment and were constructed using cheap coal exported from Australia? Why should energy-rich Australia shift energy generation from local to foreign hands and pay for the privilege? Why should taxpayers fund the huge climate gravy train of unelected bureaucrats, scientists and self-interested parties? Why worry about a warmer climate when history, archaeology and geology all show warmth allows life to thrive?

Climate change is not an issue of science. The science is settled. It is a crock. The only thing renewable about renewable energy are the subsidies. The solution to the concocted climate crisis is to cancel renewables subsidies, build high-efficient, low-emission, and nuclear power stations and let market forces rule.