The volume of lunacy pouring from the global-warming movement has steadily increased as science fails them more decisively.

The old mythology about human industry boiling the planet is deader than a doornail, buried under a mountain of data that warmists must carefully edit and distort to cook up their perennial “warmest month EVER!” headline bait. What remains is a far more nuanced picture of planetary weather patterns in which human activity may play a fairly minor role, and those relationships are far more complicated than the politicized junk science that has been costing Americans billions of dollars per year.

Nuance and complex science are of very little use to politicians, who need white-knuckle panic to suppress dissent and scam those billions from taxpayers. There are big global warming treaties coming up soon, and the special interests are not about to let a two-decade lack of global warming stop them. Those treaties will be rammed down the American voter’s throat, no matter what the theoretically self-governing peons think about them.

That’s why the white-noise static of politicians blaming climate change for everything is getting louder, even as new polls reveal Americans are far more concerned about government corruption, excessive gun control laws, government bureaucracy, terrorism, and the failure of ObamaCare than they are about “climate change.” The Ruling Class sees no profit for itself in addressing any of those issues, and quite a bit of potential damage from grappling with something like systemic government corruption.

Luckily for them, the Ruling Class doesn’t actually have to persuade anything like a majority of the American people to support its climate change agenda. It just has to sow enough confusion and discord to keep an overwhelming majority from organizing to stop them. The idealistic grade-school vision of democracy has the government faithfully executing the will of the people. In reality, our degenerate system is more about the political class and its cronies doing what they want, unless The People can muster the will to oppose them. That doesn’t happen often, because the media loves to nourish the atmosphere of perpetual crisis that weakens public opposition to activist government, and the people who profit from a Big Government scheme like global warming are usually more energized than any of the individual citizens who pay for it.

The hot new rhetorical trend for the global-warming crowd is to dimly acknowledge that the big-bucks alarmist predictions from the Eighties onward did not pan out, but global warming could maybe kinda sorta be a factor in all sorts of calamities. Whatever you’re concerned about, rest assured there is a left-wing politician out there somewhere, claiming that global warming makes it worse.

Exhibit A: Secretary of State John Kerry blaming global warming for the Syrian civil war, at the Milan Expo over the weekend:

It is not a coincidence that immediately prior to the civil war in Syria, the country experienced the worst drought on record. As many as 1.5 million people migrated from Syria’s farms into Syria’s cities, and that intensified the political unrest that was beginning to brew. Now, I’m not telling you that the crisis in Syria was caused by climate change. No. Obviously, it wasn’t. It was caused by a brutal dictator who barrel bombed, starved, tortured, and gassed his own people. But the devastating drought clearly made a bad situation a lot worse. Climate change is – to borrow a term from the Department of Defense in America – a “threat multiplier.” Even if it doesn’t ignite conflict, it has the ability to fan the flames and to make situations much more complicated for political leaders to deal with.

Trust the lunkheaded Kerry to deliver left-wing political tricks in the clumsiest way possible, like a magician who can’t make a move without marked cards tumbling out of his sleeves. Right after he tells you climate change caused droughts that caused the Syrian civil war, he says, “Now, I’m not telling you the crisis in Syria was caused by climate change.” He’s not advancing a scientific case, or even making a rational argument. He just wants you to see that climate-change boogeyman out of the corner of your eye, whenever you think about any major crisis.

Even as Barack Obama’s foreign policy leaves the entire world in flames, he and his minions have stepped up their efforts to portray climate change as America’s Number One security threat – it’s a mantra they chant in unison, while the actual security threats America faces laugh themselves silly and can’t believe their good fortune. If only Obama’s bumbling security team focused on ISIS with half the intensity they pour into their phony war against climate change!

But they’ll never do that, because actual threats are far more difficult to demagogue than imaginary ones. Team Obama can portray global warming as the many-headed hydra they can’t defeat for a century or more, despite their most noble and heroic efforts. When they talk that way about ISIS, they receive cold stares from American voters who expect the most powerful nation in the history of the world to defeat a gang of head-chopping savages on a considerably shorter timeline.

Exhibit B of the new “global warming makes everything worse” strategy is California Governor Jerry Brown blaming it for his state’s wildfires, in defiance of actual scientists and fire-fighting experts discovering no such correlation. None of the people who think “deniers” of “settled science” should be burned at the stake seem to have a problem with Brown making clearly false anti-science claims. Funny how that works.

The L.A. Times – not normally a paper hostile to global warming alarmism – sees the obvious political reasons for Brown declaring the wilderness fires were a climate-change “wake-up call,” and asserting that carbon pollution “is in many respects driving all of this”:

He had just challenged Republican presidential candidates to state their agendas on global warming. He was embroiled in a fight with the oil industry over legislation to slash gasoline use in California. And he is seeking to make a mark on international negotiations on climate change that culminate in Paris in December.

Global-warming ideology is like a shark: it constantly and aggressively moves forward, or it dies. The movement demands witch hunts and loudly challenging skeptics to “state their agendas,” lest voters begin asking tough questions about the alarmists’ agenda; they see climate change as a political tool for de-legitimizing their corporate enemies; and they constantly howl about all the tainted money their opponents are supposedly collecting from special interests, so that no one will talk about their own conflicts of interest.

The L.A. Times brings in an actual scientist to lower the boom on Brown’s rhetoric, and of course it’s someone whose common sense has already made him the target of witch hunts from the fanatics, even though he isn’t a wholesale “denier” of the human role in climate change:

But scientists who study climate change and fire behavior say their work does not show a link between this year’s wildfires and global warming, or support Brown’s assertion that fires are now unpredictable and unprecedented. There is not enough evidence, they say. University of Colorado climate change specialist Roger Pielke said Brown is engaging in “noble-cause corruption.” Pielke said it is easier to make a political case for change using immediate and local threats, rather than those on a global scale, especially given the subtleties of climate change research, which features probabilities subject to wide margins of error and contradiction by other findings. “That is the nature of politics,” Pielke said, “but sometimes the science really has to matter.”

Why should the science start mattering now? Climate-change dogma has fallen back to a redoubt that will be very difficult to dig it out of, abandoning its old imminent-doom predictions (and growing quite testy if anyone dares to bring them up) in favor of ridiculous, un-falsifiable scenarios of climate catastrophe in a century or two, and the new strategy exemplified by Kerry and Brown of portraying global warming as an immeasurable X-factor in every other crisis. You can’t prove that “carbon emissions” weren’t one of 20 factors in any given story, skeptics, so you’d better shut up and open your wallets!

Note how the conflict in the wildfire story is phrased: scientists say they have no evidence carbon emissions were a factor, so Brown takes that as a license to declare that nobody can prove they were not. This is the kind of “logic” that has sustained witch doctors and shamans across the ages.

After noting that wildfire experts worry about global-warming flapdoodle distracting people from the actual causes of increased fire damage – which ironically include past landscaping efforts to mitigate the damage from fires, and unwise housing development choices – the L.A. Times offers two hilariously contradictory quotes from members of the Brown administration:

Brown does not contend that climate change alone is making California’s fires worse, said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman for the governor’s Natural Resources Agency. But she said addressing fires in the same breath as global warming “broadens the discussion and encourages us to think about the future.” Brown’s senior environmental advisor, Cliff Rechtschaffen, has said the governor believes climate change is not regarded with sufficient urgency and should be addressed “on a World War III footing.”

Relax, folks, Brown’s not a wild-eyed lunatic or a shameless politician on the make. He just wants to “broaden the discussion” and “encourage us to think about the future.” Oh, and he thinks climate change is equivalent to a global thermonuclear war.

That statement from the Natural Resources Agency spokeswoman is essentially the same thing John Kerry said in Milan: sure, we can’t prove global warming is real or has anything to do with what we’re talking about, but we want to “broaden” every discussion and encourage people to think about climate change night and day, a specter of politically profitable doom lurking behind every tale of crisis. This keeps the public rattled enough to prevent them from rallying behind effective political leadership that could shut the climate scam down, and it lets the alarmists portray the dollars they siphon from the economy as money well spent. Why, every greenback they take is helping to fight wildfires, hurricanes, unrest in the Middle East, beach erosion, and countless other horrors! What better value could anyone ask for tax and regulatory money?

In truth, the continuing brisk sales of real estate on the beaches that our alarmist friends insist will be gone soon, and their insistence on burning thousands of tons of carbon by jet-setting their way to luxury hotels for climate-change confabs, tells you everything you need to know about what they really believe. But this isn’t about what they believe… it’s about what they can make you believe.