Causes of the rise of groupthink in academia

This is a quick note looking at some possible causes of academic groupthink and why it might be more prevalent in recent years.
We all know that climate “science” has revealed the most appalling side of academia with bullying groupthink anti-science disregard for the evidence and wholesale fraud in the compilation of temperature.
However, it’s also pretty darned certain that those involved either don’t quite see it that way or are pretty damned certain they’ve only been doing “what was normal in our profession”.
And, working on a totally different area (Roman History) I’ve began to see that modern academia is a very different kind of beast to older antiquarians. For a start, academics used to see themselves primarily as a professor or doctor of a particular University who happened to be doing their subject. As such their first allegiance was to the University, to uphold its reputation, etc.
These days, it’s often impossible to know which university the clone like so called “scientists” who pontificate on climate come from. They all seem to be a part of a borg like collective of climate academics – almost all with exactly the same views, and the same stupid answers to the same real questions.
And I think two things have really changed academia. The first is the massive drop in the price of air flights brought about by … cheap fossil fuels. That meant that instead of a month long voyage to the US, academics were able to fly for the day to  meet colleagues in the same field from all over the world.
The second was the internet. Which has in some senses made it easier for academics to talk to colleagues in their subject the other side of the world, than it is for an academic in another subject to talk to someone in the same University.
And with the change in their allegiance from University-group to subject-group, the academics lost all diversity. Because as their social group became “their peers”, so their loyalty went from their University to their subject peers and so it was their subject peers rather than their University colleagues who set their standards. And in a subject filled with third rate academics, with no history of success, and thrust into the media light who “demanded answers” from them all. It was almost inevitable that as a subject, climate academics would decide that the normal and inconvenient requirements of science, such as evidence, didn’t apply to their particular subject.
But of course, what was the backstop to dropping standards? Peer review. In other words, the same social group that had been moulded by the internet and global travel, now not only set its own standards, but it was its own judge, jury and executioner as well. And of course, the only need they ever had for executioner, was not those whose science was slipping, but those who were not “toeing the line”.
So, peer review stopped being a way of ensuring the University’s reputation would not be tarnished by bad academic work, and instead it was turned into a way the social group within a subject forced compliance to the “social norm” that the social group determined was applicable to itself.
And the other dastardly thing for climate academics was that because no new data was available for decades … they could delude themselves that they were right. So, the groupthink became ingrained. But unlike other subjects where such groupthink exists, but will never get challenged (unless for example Shakespeare rises from the grave), the climate did eventually produce the evidence to show the academics were suffering from groupthink.
This, I think is what is unique about climate. In some areas like experimental physics, they are led by the nose by the evidence. In others, established views will never be challenged by new evidence (at least from academics). But climate was caught between the two. It developed the lax approach of subjects that did not subject their views to test … but as new evidence came along it suffered the awkward fact that its views did not match the facts.