ANALYSIS/OPINION:

“Dangerous manmade global warming” has become the most systematic, massive, costly fraud ever perpetrated. This is a harsh judgment, but the mounting evidence is undeniable.

As climate analyst Anthony Watts points out, after a very modest rise over 20 years, Earth’s average temperature hasn’t increased in 17 years, even as plant-fertilizing carbon-dioxide levels climbed to nearly 400 parts per million, still a minuscule 0.04 percent of the atmosphere.

The eight years since a Category 3 hurricane hit the United States marks the longest such period since 1900, he notes. Tornado frequency is the lowest on record. Droughts are shorter and less extreme than during the Dust Bowl and 1950s.

Arctic sea ice is back to normal, following the coldest summer in decades. Antarctic ice is at a record high. Sea levels continue to rise at a meager rate of 4 to 8 inches per century. Four of the five snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters in the last half-century have occurred since 2008. This year has brought the fewest U.S. forest fires in a decade and ranks second-lowest in acres burned.

Ignoring these facts, President Obama continues to claim “dangerous” carbon-dioxide emissions are causing “unprecedented” global warming, “more extreme” hurricanes, more wildfires, and rising seas that “threaten” coastal communities. His Environmental Protection Agency just proposed stringent job-killing carbon-dioxide regulations for coal-fired power plants and has more rules in the hopper — at a time when the economy is already turning full-time positions into part-time jobs and welfare.

As they prepared their latest scary report, U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists, bureaucrats and eco-activists devised ways to cover up the “bad” news. Among other things, they deleted all references to the 17-year temperature standstill from the “summary for policymakers.” They are editing the science to reflect the politics.

Chairman Rajendra Pachauri insists that there is “definitely an increase in our belief” that humans are “responsible for climate change” and there is “no slowdown” in planetary temperature increases. The IPCC says it still has “very high confidence” that its faulty models correctly represent carbon-dioxide effects on planetary temperatures. Student papers, environmentalist press releases and baseless claims about disappearing Himalayan glaciers remain in IPCC reports, falsely presented as “peer-reviewed” studies by credentialed experts.

They also ignored an IPCC graph that reveals how every single climate model over the past 22 years predicted that average global temperatures would be up to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they actually were. How could they be so wrong?

There are several reasons: The models exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon-dioxide levels, they assume all warming since the Industrial Revolution began is a result of human-caused carbon dioxide, they use temperature data contaminated by urban heat sources, and they simplify or ignore vital climate influences like solar-energy variations, cosmic-ray fluxes, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents and recurrent phenomena like El Nino and La Nina. In other words, “GIGO”: faulty assumptions, data, algorithms, analytical methodologies and other garbage in — predictive garbage out.

Yet, the models are used to justify policies and regulations that penalize hydrocarbon use, raise energy prices, and hammer jobs, the economy and living standards.

Countries are spending billions of dollars annually on bogus models and studies that purport to link every weather anomaly and event to man-made carbon emissions, on subsidized renewable-energy programs that displace food crops and kill wildlife, on “mitigation” measures against disasters that exist only in “scenarios” generated by computer models, and on welfare programs for people unemployed and impoverished by these policies.

They are also losing tens of billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenues they would receive if they were not blocking oil, gas and coal development and use. Hundreds of billions more is lost owing to manufacturing jobs lost because companies cannot compete in international marketplaces as a result of soaring electricity and transportation-fuel prices.

The European Union alone will pay $250 billion every year for 87 more years, because of its climate and renewable-energy policies, according to calculations by “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. That’s $20 trillion by 2100 — all to achieve a reduction in average global temperatures by 0.1 degree Fahrenheit.

Under Obama administration policies and tutelage from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United States is heading in the same direction. These ideologues are playing with people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards. They refuse to acknowledge that their scary forecasts are wrong, and they reject growing evidence that we do not face an imminent man-made climate disaster.

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change’s 2013 Climate Change Reconsidered report convincingly and systematically refutes claims that we need to take immediate, drastic action to prevent “unprecedented” climate and weather events that are no more frequent or unusual than what humans have adapted to for thousands of years.

We “skeptics” and “deniers” know global warming and climate change are “real.” We deny, however, assertions that human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions have replaced the complex solar, planetary and cosmic forces that caused previous changes. We want solid evidence — which alarmists have failed to provide — to support their disaster claims.

The only conclusion we can draw is that people worldwide are being conned into sacrificing their jobs, freedoms, health and well-being to government bureaucrats, on the altar of climate alarmism.

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and author of “Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death” (Merril Press, 2012).

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