For nearly four decades, we’ve increasingly been bombarded with global warming alarmism. What actually should alarm us is the corruption of science and, consequently, the undermining of knowledge-based authority.

“Global warming” began being called “climate change” about the time warming so obviously had tapered off that annual differences were essentially immeasurable, and well within the margin of error.

But warmists profit by scaring people to justify heavy-handed schemes for wealth transfer and control. To salvage their schemes, they substituted an unremarkable, meaningless expression – climate change – and claimed it had an innate, identical urgency.

In the immortal – or should we say, immoral – words of Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

We long ago took a twilight-zone detour to where reality no longer is bound by facts, a “journey into a wondrous land of imagination,” as Rod Serling might have put it.

But, once enough scientists are revealed to be mere propagandists, all science comes into question. Once “facts” are shown simply to be concocted hoopla, moral groundings sink in quagmires of doubt.

After liars are finally exposed, when can we again believe anything they say? “This time we’re not lying!” doesn’t inspire much confidence.

This is the real dilemma posed by global warming alarmism, aka climate change, which for decades screamed that human-caused atmospheric heat threatens the planet – despite overwhelming contrary evidence.

Loss of credibility undermines public confidence, in turn, undermining legitimate authority. We are quickly approaching the point when cynicism replaces skepticism. The consequences will make global warming seem like the mild excuse for panic that it is. We already are living in an age of absurdity in which the History Channel airs documentaries on extraterrestrial visitation.

If we no longer can trust, where can we turn for truth? That constitutes cause for real panic.

Yours truly has written for years that global warming’s war on reality never was about the globe getting warmer. It always has been about control and money. Their control and your money.

As with all wars, the first victim was truth. The latest exposed canard shows warmists behind what some people call “one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.” Climate data from South America have been “adjusted” since the 1950s to give the impression that the Earth’s temperature is rising more than original data showed.

That revelation is hardly new. This columnist years ago noted the routine “adjustment” of raw data then asked why the formulas for adjusting couldn’t be shared with the public. Moreover, why were scores of earthbound temperature measuring stations around the world – a disproportionate number of them in cold climes – no longer being used?

Global warming data manipulation, half-truths, fallacious reasoning and flat-out distortions are corrupting science and public policy. They are agendas driven by lust for control and money.

For 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency resisted releasing data from two key studies, while using those studies to justify some of the most costly regulations in history. The public and Congress were denied access to the data, which supposedly showed deadly dangers posed by fine particulate matter, which became the basis for Draconian regulations. Whistle-blowers finally leaked the information.

Now we know that there is no real-world evidence to suggest that not meeting EPA’s contrived parts-per-million emission standard causes sudden, or long-term, death, as the EPA insisted. “The claim that [it] kills people is at the heart and soul of how the EPA is selling these regulations,” said Steve Milloy, former editor of JunkScience.com. “But it’s a claim that’s not supported by the facts or evidence. The EPA has rigged the whole process.”

Not only is the science fraudulent, it remained secret until surreptitiously leaked.

Nevertheless, EPA press secretary Liz Purchia has insisted the resulting air quality standards are supported by “sound science and legal standards.” Or, as the Wizard of Oz put it, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

When, by government or by scientific edict, “Yes” becomes “No,” and “Fact” is replaced by “Fiction,” we live out George Orwell’s “1984,” where, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Exploitation of fearful people suppresses their knowledge of reality.

“[A]fter all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?” Orwell wrote. “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” observed the book’s protagonist. “It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: The logic of their position demanded it.”

Dubious temperatures, the supposed effects of human-caused CO2 emissions, particulates per million – are all doubtful claims and standards that mean just what those who stand to gain choose them to mean, “neither more nor less.” All the better to pick your pocket and control your lives.