The climate cartel – how three institutions control the narrative

In the first essay of this series, I discussed medieval vineyards in Yorkshire and cattle grazing in Greenland where permafrost now reigns. In the second essay, I revealed the dilemma of my conversion – the trappings of academic funding combined with narrative containment – you know, Deep Throat follow-the-money kinda stuff. I ended the second essay with a promise: this week I would show you what happened when I began asking, out loud, how much of recent warming might simply be a natural rebound from the Little Ice Age …

The reaction was swift, professional, and chillingly polite.

A senior colleague took me aside after a faculty meeting. “You are asking the wrong question,” she said. “Some questions are structurally un-fundable.” A senior college executive gently reminded everyone on the schoolwide chat that our department’s largest (7-figure) grant was up for competitive renewal soon. And that certain questions could threaten funding.

A principal investigator regarding that grant sits on an important committee.

The sentiment and means of constriction are not merely unscientific. The attempt to erase medieval warming was not because it was wrong. It threatened specific rivers of money.

There are three institutions that, together, function as the operating system of permissible climate science. They do not need to meet in secret. They do not need handshake agreements. They keep the incentives perfectly aligned.

1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) secretariat and lead author selection process
2. The Big Three research funders: U.S. National Science Foundation (US NSF), EU Horizon/European Research Council (ERC), UK Research and Innovation/Natural Environment Research Council (UKRI-NERC)
3. The editorial boards of the four journals that matter: Nature, Science, Nature Climate Change, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)

Control these sluice gates and you control the generation of “climate science”.

The mathematics of silence

In “FY 2023”, the U.S. National Science Foundation’s climate-related investments totalled approximately US$420 million across relevant programs. An estimated $1.7 million (0.4%) supported projects with “natural variability” or “solar forcing” as primary mechanisms. Horizon Europe 2023-24 climate-tagged funding (primarily Cluster 6 and related calls) totalled approximately $3.3 billion. Less than $11 million (~0.3%) supported topics that could challenge strong anthropogenic attribution (e.g., primary natural variability). The breakdowns are in tables 1 and 2 below for reconstruction from public NSF data and Horizon work program calls.

Table 1: US NSF grants, 2023

Table 2: European Commission Horizon Europe Work Program 2023-2024 Cluster 6 – Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment. 

These are not conspiracy numbers. They are public budget tables.

The effect is structural. A young, career-minded researcher writes proposals that fit the consensus frame. A mid-career, promotion-minded researcher reviews papers that fit the consensus frame. A senior, grant-pipeline-optimizing researcher selects lead authors who fit the consensus frame.

The lasso closes perfectly.

I watched a reviewer recommend a “major revision” reducing three paragraphs on the Medieval Warm Period to one sentence. I withdrew as a co-author when another quietly moved the discussion of solar indirect effects from the abstract into a supplementary file because “it distracts from the main message.” I watched a stressed colleague delete an entire figure showing centennial-scale Holocene variability because the chair wrote, “This risks being misinterpreted by denialists.” I took him out for beers, and shortly thereafter he “packaged out”.

They were not evil people – they were rational actors responding to the perfectly rational incentives that golden handcuffs demand.

The IPCC selection valve

Every six to eight years, the IPCC opens nominations for lead authors. Governments and approved organizations submit names. The Bureau (34 senior scientists elected by IPCC members, including the chair, vice-chairs, and working group co-chairs) makes the final cut from nominations.

In the AR6 cycle, 721 authors were selected from thousands of nominees. It appears that only 11 had ever published a first-author paper that could be read as emphasizing natural variability over anthropogenic forcing. Eleven out of 721. Again, these are public CVs.

Table 3: IPCC author diversity 

The result is not corruption in the ethical sense. It is filtration. The narrative for policymakers is written first, the technical chapters are adjusted later. Filtration happens upstream, long before anyone sits down to write. At least if you want to be selected.

I was invited onto a Zoom call to be welcomed into the mix. Twice. I declined, citing “professional load”.

The editorial choke point

The four journals that matter receive thousands of climate-related submissions per year. Each has an acceptance rate below 8%. The gatekeepers are the senior editors and their advisory boards, overwhelmingly drawn from the same pool of IPCC authors.

Table 4: Elite journal acceptance rates

A 2023 study found that papers projecting high-end warming or strong attribution received ~45% more media coverage and were cited ~70–80% more often than those emphasizing natural variability or lower sensitivity. The market rewards certainty. The journals are the market.

Even more revealing is the figure below, which quantifies “authority bias” where high-impact/alarm papers receive 50-100% more media/citations despite minority views in science (Figure 3 shows ~60–80% amplification for extreme scenarios).

Figure 1 – Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility – group level. a Total number of publications by the climate change contrarian (CCC; red) and climate change scientist (CCS; blue)groups. 224 CCC indicates the subset of 224 CCCs comprised of just the individuals with at least oneWeb of Science publication; 224 CCS indicates the 224 most-cited CCSs. b Total number of citationsfrom the publications in a. Total number of unique media articles from c all media sources and d 30 select mainstream media sources.

I co-submitted a review paper that compiled 43 high-resolution proxy records showing large pre-industrial variability. It was rejected by Nature Climate Change in under 3 weeks with the polite note: “While accurate, the manuscript does not present a significant advance in understanding.”

Translation: it does not move the policy needle.

Climategate without drama

People still talk about the 2009 leaked emails as if they revealed malice.

They revealed something more mundane and more powerful: ordinary career preservation.

Recall that one senior author reportedly wrote to another (as recounted in U.S. Senate testimony), “We need to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” [Deming, 2006; related sentiment in Overpeck email, 2009 Climategate leaks].

Overpeck’s email was not suggesting that data be falsified; I believe that the message was to get rid of its rhetorical power.

The method chosen was statistical (principal component analysis that down-weighted the inconvenient proxies), but the motive was professional.

Nothing in those emails shocked me. But I was shocked that people were shocked.

I had seen the same dynamic in polite, well-lit conference rooms in the cheese and cracker line.

So have many of you.

Cartel currency

The cartel does not run on conspiracy.

It runs on money, status, and fear of ostracism. The money is real: $4-6 billion annually in public and philanthropic ($2-3 billion alone) funding flows through the consensus frame. The status is real: lead authorship is the fastest route to Royal Society fellowships and national academies.

The fear is real: I know tenured professors who privately agree the models run too hot but will not say so on the record before retirement.

I suspect they will be eventually given a token, vestigial lab to feel like they still play a part.

And to keep them quiet.

Most scientists are not liars. They are simply human beings who have learned which questions are safe and which questions cost marriages and mortgages.

I reached the breaking point nearly two years ago when I was asked to sign on to a commentary asserting “unequivocal” human causation of all recent warming. I declined. The lead wrote back: “I understand, but we need unity right now.”

Unity. Not accuracy. Unity is the cartel’s true product.

Not science.

Next essay I will disclose what happened when I asked why the risk models we use to inform curricula still use equilibrium climate sensitivity values that every new observational constraint has been pushing downward for 15 years. Spoiler alert: the error bars have not disappeared because the science improved; they disappeared because certainty pays the bills. 

Many in the industry have grown weary of the process.

Once you see the cartel’s fingerprints, you cannot unsee them.

And once you speak to them, you soon discover that authenticity can be very expensive.

(Richard LeBlanc, BIG Media Ltd., 2026)