THIS POST IS A PRESENTATION OF EXAMPLES FROM THE CHARLES MACKAY BOOK “EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS” {EPD-MOC} WITH THE PROPOSITION THAT THE CLIMATE CHANGE CRISIS OF OUR TIME IS BEST UNDERSTOOD IN THIS CONTEXT.

EPD-MOC #1: THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME: The Mississippi Company (French: Compagnie du Mississippi; founded 1684, named the Company of the West from 1717, and the Company of the Indies from 1719^[1]) was a corporation holding a business monopoly in French colonies in North America and the West Indies. The rise and fall of the company is connected with the activities of the Scottish financier and economist John Law who was then the Controller General of Finances of France. When the speculation in French financial circles, and the land development in the region became frenzied and detached from economic reality, the Mississippi bubble became one of the earliest examples of an economic bubble. (source: Wikipedia)

EPD-MOC #2: THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE :

South Sea Bubble, the speculation mania that ruined many British investors in 1720. The bubble, or hoax, centred on the fortunes of the South Sea Company, founded in 1711 to trade (mainly in slaves) with Spanish America, on the assumption that the War of the Spanish Succession, then drawing to a close, would end with a treaty permitting such trade. The company’s stock, with a guaranteed interest of 6 percent, sold well, but the relevant peace treaty, the Treaty of Utrecht made with Spain in 1713, was less favourable than had been hoped, imposing an annual tax on imported slaves and allowing the company to send only one ship each year for general trade. The success of the first voyage in 1717 was only moderate, but King George I of Great Britain became governor of the company in 1718, creating confidence in the enterprise, which was soon paying 100 percent interest. The South Sea Company had been founded in 1711 as a trading and finance company. In 1720 there was an incredible boom in South Sea stock, as a result of the company’s proposal, accepted by Parliament, to take over the national debt. The company expected to recoup itself from expanding trade, but chiefly from the foreseen rise in the value of its shares. These did, indeed, rise dramatically, from 128 1/2 in January 1720 to more than 1,000 in August. Those unable to buy South Sea stock were inveigled by overly optimistic company promoters or downright swindlers into unwise investments. By September the market had collapsed, and by December South Sea shares were down to 124, dragging other, including government, stock with them. Many investors were ruined, and the House of Commons ordered an inquiry, which showed that at least three ministers had accepted bribes and speculated. Many of the company’s directors were disgraced. The scandal brought Robert Walpole, generally considered to be the first British prime minister, to power. He promised to seek out all those responsible for the scandal, but in the end he sacrificed only some of those involved in order to preserve the reputations of the government’s leaders. SOURCE: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA

EPD-MOC #3: THE TULIPOMANIA :

Tulip mania was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels, and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. It is generally considered to have been the first recorded speculative bubble or asset bubble in history. In many ways, the tulip mania was more of a hitherto unknown socio-economic phenomenon than a significant economic crisis. It had no critical influence on the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, which was one of the world’s leading economic and financial powers in the 17th century, with the highest per capita income in the world from about 1600 to 1720. The term “tulip mania” is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values. In Europe, formal futures markets appeared in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century. Among the most notable centered on the tulip market, at the height of tulip mania. At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan. Research is difficult because of the limited economic data from the 1630s, much of which come from biased and speculative sources. Some modern economists have proposed rational explanations, rather than a speculative mania, for the rise and fall in prices. For example, other flowers, such as the hyacinth, also had high initial prices at the time of their introduction, which then fell as the plants were propagated. The high asset prices may also have been driven by expectations of a parliamentary decree that contracts could be voided for a small cost, thus lowering the risk to buyers. The 1637 event gained popular attention in 1841 with the publication of the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, who wrote that at one point 5 hectares (12 acres) of land were offered for a Semper Augustus bulb. Mackay claimed that many investors were ruined by the fall in prices, and Dutch commerce suffered a severe shock. Although Mackay’s book is a classic, his account is contested. Many modern scholars feel that the mania was not as extraordinary as Mackay described and argue that not enough price data is available to prove that a tulip bulb bubble actually occurred.

EPD-MOC #4: THE ALCHYMISTS :

WIKIPEDIA LINK; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds

The section on alchemysts focuses primarily on efforts to turn base metals into gold. Mackay notes that many of these practitioners were themselves deluded, convinced that these feats could be performed if they discovered the correct old recipe or stumbled upon the right combination of ingredients. Although alchemists gained money from their sponsors, mainly noblemen, he notes that the belief in alchemy by sponsors could be hazardous to its practitioners, as it wasn’t rare for an unscrupulous noble to imprison a supposed alchemist until he could produce gold he said he could produce. (wikipedia)

MODERN POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS#1: OZONE DEPLETION #1

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2010/05/11/scareology-101-a-brief-history-of-extreme-environmentalism/

1969, The SST: A plan to develop high altitude supersonic airliners with the Boeing 2707 as a concept vehicle. The very high cruising altitude of the SST raised environmental alarms that included both climate change and ozone depletion.

1969, Climate change: An alarm is raised that chemicals and aerosols in the exhaust of the SST jet engines will cause climate change.

1970, Ozone depletion: The climate change theory is quietly shelved after critical reviews by skeptics and a new alarm is raised. Water vapor in the SST jet exhaust will cause a 4% depletion of ozone in the ozone layer causing 40,000 additional cases of skin cancer every year in the USA alone.

1970, Ozone depletion: The water vapor theory is quietly forgotten after critical reviews by skeptics who produced data showing that higher levels of water in the stratosphere is coincident with higher levels of ozone.

1970, Ozone depletion: A new ozone depletion theory emerges. Nitric oxide (NOx) in the SST jet exhaust will cause ozone depletion because NOx acts as a catalyst to destroy ozone without being consumed in the process.

1971, Ozone depletion: A computer model is developed to assess the impact of NOx in SST exhaust on the ozone layer. The model predicts that there will be a 50% ozone depletion and a worldwide epidemic of skin cancer. Animals that venture out during daylight will become blinded by UV radiation.  It was an apocalyptic scenario.

1971, Ozone depletion: NOx in the fireball of open air nuclear tests provide a ready laboratory to test the ozone depletion properties of NOx. The computer model predicted 10% ozone depletion by NOx from nuclear testing. Measurements showed no ozone depletion; but the model won anyway and the ozone depletion scare endured.

1972, Death of the SST: We were so frightened by the ozone depletion scare that the SST program was canceled although America’s skies soon became filled with supersonic fighters and bombers spewing NOx without any evidence of ozone depletion or of skin cancer or of blindness in animals.

1972, Nuclear summer: Although not confirmed by the data, ozone depletion by nuclear bombs predicted by the computer model took on a life of its own and morphed into a new catastrophe theory called the nuclear summer.

1972, Nuclear summer: The phrase “nuclear summer” is everywhere in the media. There is a doomsday forecast that the immediate result of a nuclear war will be the total annihilation of the ozone layer. All life on earth will be wiped out by UV radiation. Therefore there can be no winner or loser in a nuclear exchange of sufficient intensity. Mutual assured destruction.

1973, Nuclear summer: Report by the National Academy of Science: An exchange of thousands of megatons of nuclear bombs will increase NOx in the stratosphere by an order of magnitude. The NOx will destroy 30%-70% of the ozone in the northern hemisphere and 20%-40% of ozone in the southern hemisphere. Within a few months we will be blinded and roasted by UV radiation with blistering of the skin. The atmosphere will take 30 years to recover. All of these findings were derived from a sophisticated computer model and these findings were supported by a broad consensus of scientists.

1973, Nuclear summer: Skeptics of the ozone scare point out that the study of nuclear testing did not show any ozone depletion and also that vast amounts of NOx – more than man could ever inject into the stratosphere – is made by nature when solar wind strikes nitrogen in the atmosphere; and therefore that there must be something wrong with the computer model that causes it to over-estimate the effect of NOx on ozone.

1973, Space Shuttle: Unperturbed by the skeptics and emboldened by their SST success, fear mongering scientists turn their attention to the proposed Space Shuttle program. The shuttle design included two solid fuel rockets that emit hydrogen chloride (HCl). Scientists calculated that 50 flights per year would deposit 5000 tons of HCl per year in the stratosphere that could cause a 10% ozone depletion over Florida and 1% to 2% elsewhere. Although the scare was hyped it never got to the SST levels and the space shuttle miraculously survived the ozone scare.

1974, Ozone depletion: The ozone depletion game was now in full gear. Having tasted the power of being able to inflict debilitating fear of ozone depletion, the scientists embarked on a fishing expedition to find other chemicals generated by human activity that could get up to the stratosphere and catalyze the chemical reactions of ozone depletion.

1974, CFC: A new candidate agent for ozone depletion is found. Chlorofluorocarbons are synthetic chemicals used in aerosol sprays and in refrigerant for air conditioners and refrigerators. CFC emissions to the atmosphere accumulate in the stratosphere because there are no sinks to remove them from the lower atmosphere. Up in the stratosphere they are able to catalyze the destruction of ozone. The ozone depletion game was thus begun anew.

1974, Doomsday Theory:  When CFCs rise to the stratosphere they are decomposed by UV radiation to release chlorine. The chlorine ion can then catalyze thousands of ozone destruction cycles without being consumed. Up to 40% of the ozone will be destroyed. The chlorine theory was old but its ready supply from CFCs was a completely new angle and so a new doomsday scenario was quickly sketched out for dissemination.

NY Times, September 26, 1974, A big day for Doomsday journalism. The NYT predicts ozone depletion of 18% by 1990 and 50% by 2030 by CFCs will cause skin cancer epidemic, mutation of frogs, blindness in animals and people. The whole world is frightened. The ozone scare had begun anew this time with CFC as the agent of ozone depletion. The scare was very successful and it appeared in various forms almost every day in newspapers and television for the next two decades.

See http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/11/ozone-hole-news-archives-march-10-1987.html

1983, nuclear winter: Carl Sagan and co-authors publish an article in Science that, based on their computer model, a nuclear exchange between the Cold War rivals or even a single preemptive strike by one upon the other would spew enough particulates and aerosols into the stratosphere to occlude sunlight for weeks causing temperatures worldwide to drop by 30C. Social and human settlement infrastructures will collapse and throughout the world there would be starvation, hypothermia, disease, and death.

1983, nuclear winter: Skeptics point out flaws in the nuclear winter computer model saying that it does not include the effect of oceans and of weather phenomena such as hurricanes that would clear the mist out of the stratosphere; but the nuclear winter scare continued to get top play in the media.

1985, nuclear winter: Sagan and co-authors finally admit that they may have exaggerated the nuclear winter effects of their model but that they did it for a good cause and that was to preserve the deterrence property of nuclear weapons that was thought to be in jeopardy due to improvements in nuclear weapons technology and the dangerous idea contained in the Star Wars program that a nuclear war was winnable.

1980, global warming: scientists detect rising carbon dioxide levels coincident with rising temperatures since the industrial revolution and conclude that the increase in CO2 comes from our use of fossil fuels and that it cause temperatures to rise.

See https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2010/05/09/history-of-the-global-warming-scare/

1992, Scientists discover large quantities of chlorine monoxide in the stratosphere above the Arctic circle and announce that it will cause an ozone hole over the Arctic with dire forecasts of UV related disease and destruction to follow.

1992, Scientists announce that the ozone hole problem over the Arctic is worse than previously thought because along with high concentrations of chlorine in the stratosphere they also found unusually low concentrations of NOx in the lower atmosphere. This is bad because “NOx is the immune system of the atmosphere” because it protects ozone from destruction by chlorine.

MODERN POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS#1: OZONE DEPLETION #2

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/09/30/ozone-depletion-part-2/

SUMMARY: The overall structure of changes in total column ozone levels over a 50-year sample period from 1966 to 2015 and across a range of latitudes from -90 to +71 shows that the data from Antarctica prior to 1995 represent a peculiar outlier condition specific to that time and place and not a representation of long term trends in global mean ozone concentration. The finding is inconsistent with the Rowland-Molina theory of chemical ozone depletion and with the use of the periodic “ozone hole” condition at the South Pole as supporting evidence for this theory first proposed in Farman etal 1985. We conclude from this analysis that the Farman etal 1985 paper, a study of brief ozone anomalies at the South Pole that served to legitimize the ozone crisis and the rise of the UN as global environmental protection agency, is a fatally flawed study too constrained by time and space to have any implication for long term trends in global mean ozone concentration.

MODERN POPULAR DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS#3: CLIMATE CHANGE:

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/04/28/the-new-climate-science/

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL DESTROY THE PLANET

SUMMARY:

Here we propose that the environmentalism fear and fervor of the teenage girls derives from a corruption of the middle school curriculum in the age of tree hugger Bambi environmentalism where environmentalism has morphed from the idea that human welfare can be enhanced by humans managing their surroundings (“Environ” in French)to the Bambi-ism idea in Genesis that humans are the managers and caretakers of nature. The basic middle school curriculum should focus preparing the students for high school with things like math, reading, writing, grammar, The middle school curriculum that used to be these basics has been corrupted by environmentalism of the teachers and it is apparently a kind of environmentalism that can be described as “tree hugger” or “Bambi-ism” where humans are an evil and destructive force upon nature.

THE IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG KIDS THAT EMERGE FROM MIDDLE SCHOOL THUS SCARED TO DEATH OF A HUMAN DESTRUCTION OF INNOCENT NATURE SCENARIO EASILY INTERPRET CLIMATE CHANGE IN THAT WAY AS HUMANS DESTROYING NATURE. THE ENVIRONMENTALISM INTERPRETATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE BY THESE KIDS AND THEIR DEVASATING FEAR OF CLIMATE CHANGE EXPRESSED BY THE KIDS ARE BEST UNDERSTOOD IN THIS CONTEXT. THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM HAS BECOME CORRUPTED BY THE ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM OF TEACHERS SUCH THAT THE EFFECT IS A CRUEL FORM OF CHILD ABUSE.