If you haven’t yet read Andy West’s book “The Grip of Culture” about the sociology of climate catastrophism, please do. You can download it free here
or buy the print edition

 It’s billed as a summary of the articles he contributed at Climate Etc. on the research he conducted on international opinion surveys about attitudes to climate change, but it’s much more than that.
 
Very briefly, and at the risk of distorting his message, what I take Andy to be saying is this:
Climate catastrophism is a culture, understood in the specialised sense used by a growing number of academics in the fields of anthropology, psychology, & cultural history, i.e. an irrational belief system that performs important social functions. Others have had this insight, but Andy proves it.
 
What makes Andy’s book important is that he provides the kind of evidence that social scientists respect, in the form of strong correlations between strength of religious belief in dozens of countries and belief in dangerous global warming. What’s groundbreaking is the finding that the correlation turns out to be strongly positive or negative, depending on how you formulate the question: if you ask people to rate a list of different global threats, you get a positive correlation with national religiosity, while if you ask people to name a threat, you get a negative one. 
 
A possible explanation (for which Andy is not responsible) is that people in countries with a stronger religious ethos may tend to believe in catastrophic climate change because they recognise it as being like a religion, something they’re happy with. People in non-religious societies, on the other hand, may believe because it replaces the religion they’ve lost, or never had. In the first case you’re merely acknowledging that a belief in global warming exists, and is something of which you approve. Only in the second case is belief likely to turn into religious zealotry. If you’ve already got a religion, you’ll like climate catastrophe because it’s familiar; if you haven’t, you’ll go for it because you need something to believe in. Either way, Andy’s meta-analysis of dozens of surveys demonstrates a high correlation of belief in catastrophic climate change with both religious belief and non-belief in society, depending how you measure climate belief. It’s difficult to imagine a more convincing demonstration that belief in catastrophic climate change is fundamentally irrational. 
 
The point about identifying climate catastrophe belief as a culture, (or “cultural narrative,” a term I prefer, since it avoids many misunderstandings) is that it’s a wider term than religion, embracing a variety of ideologies. Andy makes a number of observations based on the research in this wide, though ill-defined field, the most interesting one being that a culture (in this sense) is necessarily irrational. It won’t do its job (of inculcating a sense of social cohesion etc.) if it’s based on rational grounds.
 
This has huge implications. What’s the point of opposing a belief with rational argument if the whole point of it is that it must necessarily be irrational?
 
We can all agree that ideologies that we don’t agree with are irrational. But what about your own ideology, be it religious, political, or simply a deeply held belief? If Andy West is right, we are all prey to irrational beliefs. 
 
I tried to test this claim by conducting an honest introspective examination of a belief of my own, namely socialism, and I assure you the results were enlightening – and disturbing.
 
–  What’s Socialism ever done for us?
–  Well, it brought us one man one vote, equal rights for women, and before that, free street lighting and piped water. Then free education, the National Health Service, an end to colonialism..
-Yes, but apart from that…
 
You know the sketch.
 
Of course, I had no difficulty identifying things in the history of socialism that I reject, from the Bolshevik revolution onwards. Orwell & thousands of others have already trodden that path. More seriously, in playing this game of introspection, I came to admit are features of any imaginable modern attempt at socialism (say, the policies that might have been enacted by a putative Corbyn government) which I can see would cause problems that would almost inevitably lead to disaster, and to which I have no solution. It’s only a mental game after all, but however I play it, I come to the same conclusion: to overcome the difficulties and resolve the problems I encounter, I would need to take charge of everything. 
 
And I’m not Stalin, even when playing mind games. I don’t have his talent.
 
Anyone with a minimum of historical knowledge can make an impressive list of the failings of socialism. (And I’m not talking about extreme claims, like that once made by Jordan Peterson, that Marx was responsible for the deaths of 40 million people.) And any socialist will have as stock of replies to these claims. The truth is, they may be partially or even largely true. But they don’t work, at least not always. And the more you try to make them work, the more you’re forced to admit that they can’t work. You can’t make them work without positing a situation of total omniscience and ultimately total control. This is the sense of 1984, I think. It’s not so much a prediction as a pursuit of an idea (an ideal) to its logical conclusion. Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of modern science or mathematics will appreciate the quandary. It’s like being faced with a theorem that can’t be proved, or a system that is inherently chaotic, or a logic that can never be both complete and internally consistent. 
 
This doesn’t stop me from being a socialist, but it does make me more reticent about any claims I make. Try it with your own deeply held beliefs. I promise you it will make you think.
 
Of course, my introspective musings concern no-one but myself, but they have convinced me that Andy is on to something important with his insistence that belief in catastrophic climate change is not just a sum of mistaken beliefs, like thinking that average global temperatures can be measured to a hundredth of a degree and that installing heat pumps will save the planet. The idea that cultural narratives are a driving force in societies seems to me to be one of the most useful and interesting ideas of recent years. 
 
*******   
 
There are signs that the climate catastrophe narrative may be dying, or at least declining. Greens were in retreat in the recent European elections, and even here in France, where they are still treated with the deference formerly reserved for philosophers and religious leaders, there is a noticeable change in emphasis in the Green agenda for the coming election, with talk of climate catastrophe and electric cars giving way to more mundane subjects like banning pesticides and stopping unnecessary motorway building. 
 
The Greens themselves, like all ideological believers, are largely unaware of the radical cultural narrative they are enacting. To reduce global temperatures by 0.01°C per year requires a world government with powers to regulate every aspect of your life, while keeping pesticides out of your breakfast cereal merely entails passing a law, changing a molecule or two, maybe hiring a few more busybody inspectors – something that any healthy democracy should be able to manage. To remain acceptable (and get elected) Greens are forced to become more realist, which of course makes them less interesting. 
 
Anyone can martyr themselves to save the planet, if they’re persuaded that it’s a matter of life and death. Few are willing to devote their lives to making your fly spray less toxic.