Lying about climate change to advance the environmental agenda is a good idea, say two economists in a peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

The authors, Assistant Professors of Economics Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, take it as a given that both the media and the science establishment routinely exaggerate the problem of climate change. But unlike the majority of their colleagues in academe – who primly deny that any such problem exists – they go one step further by actively endorsing dishonesty as a way of forcing through (apparently) desirable public policy.

The abstract of their paper reads:

It appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations havethe tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate thedamage caused by climate change. This articleprovides a rationale for this tendency by using a modified InternationalEnvironmentalAgreement (IEA) model with asymmetric information.We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, asit ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA, which will eventually enhance global welfare. From the ex ante perspective, however, the impact that manipulating information has on the level of participation in an IEA and on welfareis ambiguous.

This paper will be excellent news for climate scientists working at institutions like NASA GISS, the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, and Penn State University.

For many years now, they have faced the huge challenge of trying to maintain their academic credibility and generous government grant funding despite increasing evidence that man-made global warming theory is a busted flush and that really it is about time they all found jobs more suited to their talents, such as enquiring whether sir would like a large fries and McFlurry with his Big Mac.

Now, thanks to the inspired sophistry of their new friends Assistant Professors of Economics Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao their various data manipulation, decline-hiding, FOI-breaching, scientific-method abusing shenanigans have been made to seem not evil or wrong but actively desirable for the good of mankind.

This is not quite the first time that climate scientists have advocated lying in pursuit of the higher cause of greater global regulation, one world government, economic stagnation and higher energy prices.

First to do so was the late Stephen Schneider who famously argued as early as 1989:

“So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramaticstatements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” which we frequently find ourselves in cannot besolved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balanceis between being effective and being honest. I hope that means beingboth.”

James “Death Trains” Hansen – formerly Chief Alarmist at NASA GISS – too has made the case that “scary scenarios” can be a good way of concentrating the gullible public’s mind in the absence of solid evidence.

But no peer-reviewed scientific paper till now has articulated the case for lying quite so brazenly as this one by

Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao. A Nobel Prize for their sterling service to the cause of Climate Alarmism is surely now a mere formality.