Fresh on the heels of a warning that the United Nations may use force against countries defying its climate-change mandates, the world body has just informed the United States that “it cannot avoid compensating poorer nations hit by climate change, despite Donald Trump honoring his election promise of leaving the 2015 Paris climate agreement,” reports Breitbart.

The bill is high, too, with “green groups” saying the price tag will “top $300 billion annually by 2030 … the majority of which is expected to be invoiced to the U.S.,” Breitbart also tells us.

The site further informs:

Delegates and observers at the COP25 negotiations in Madrid told AFP that Washington seeks a change to the U.N. climate convention that could release it from punitive “loss and damage” funding for developing nations which is predicted to run into the billions of dollars.

Under the bedrock U.N. climate treaty, adopted in 1992, rich nations agreed to help developing countries prepare for unavoidable future climate impacts — the twin pillars of “mitigation” and “adaptation”.

But there was no provision for helping countries and small island states now calling for compensation.

A new mechanism was established in 2013, but with damage estimates climbing, there is no agreement on where the money might come from or even if it should be paid, although the U.S. is constantly the target of calls for financial reparations because it is rich, successful and a dominant world economic force.

Of course, many consider this just another pretext for the redistribution of wealth — with “rich nations” (a.k.a. “Western suckers”) being considered guilty till proven innocent with no proof sufficient.

Once just plain old global warming, the shape-shifting phenomenon that was later rebranded “climate change,” then “global climate disruption” — and now, extreme makeover-style, “global meltdown” and “climate collapse” — has predictions as variable as its name. Higher temperatures are supposed prove the man-caused climate change thesis; then again, global warming could mean global cooling, we were told, and more volatile weather proves the theory, too. So unless there’s San Diego weather the world over henceforth, the country with a $23 trillion national debt is going to have to cough it up to the climate aggrieved. That is, unless Americans still govern America.

In case they don’t, however, COP25 officials have many ideas for transferring wealth, including “U.N.-administered taxes on financial transactions, international air travel and fossil fuels,” reported Breitbart in an earlier article.

This doesn’t mean the United States is alone in being green-targeted for its green. Among the 25,000 delegates who flew into Madrid on CO 2 -spewing air-transport machines was Carlos Fuller from Belize, who “told the BBC that Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and China were ‘part of the problem’ because of their refusal to guarantee any payments for their climate ‘sins,’” reports Climate Change Dispatch.

“The only agreement amongst representatives,” the site continues, “is that the U.S. alone might be left with a multi-billion dollar tab.”

Yet as is often the case with reparations movements, the would-be takers are to a degree, sometimes, fakers. Consider that major recipients could be island nations such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, both of which were recently pleading climate victim status before a UN conference. Yet while an onus is sometimes put on India, both those island nations have greater CO2 emissions per capita than India does, with the Maldives’ figure almost twice as high. So do they owe India climate reparations?

The main problem with such wealth-transfer schemes, however, is that the man-caused global-warming thesis is based on a lot of hot air. Consider:

• Climate data appear very unreliable, and many scientists say that the temperature ceased rising approximately 20 years ago. Moreover, insofar as the climate is changing — and it always does — there’s no proof man’s activities are responsible.

• The claim that “97 percent of scientists affirm” man-caused global warming was always false. There’s much disagreement on the matter, and, besides, “consensus” isn’t a term of science, but politics.

• CO 2 is not a pollutant, but plant “food,” which is why botanists pump it into greenhouses and why crop yields are greater when levels are higher; it’s why the age of the dinosaurs, when CO 2 levels were six to seven times today’s, was characterized by lush foliage everywhere. Also, calling CO2 “carbon” is like calling H2O “hydrogen” — it’s a propaganda term.

• In fact, astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James warned in 2013 that life on Earth will end because of too little CO 2 (in approximately one billion years). Plants can’t photosynthesize when levels are too low.

• Some scientists believe that we’re actually poised to enter another ice age; this would be truly dangerous because people and animals generally fare better in warmer temperatures.

• Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, the head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculated in 2017 that reducing the global temperature three-tenths of one degree by the century’s end — meaning, postponing so-called “global warming” less than four years — would cost $100 trillion (no, that’s not a typo).

• Climate models have been consistently inaccurate, yet alarmists still want them to shape policy. Is this logical? Would you take a “hot stock tip” from a broker who’d been consistently wrong for more than a generation?

• Doomsday prognostications have been no better. Professor Paul Ehrlich, Population Bomb author, predicted in 1968 that a famine would cause “hundreds of millions of people … to starve to death” in the United States in the 1970s and that by 1999, our population would have declined to 22.6 million, reported Professor Walter E. Williams in his 2008 article “Environmentalists Wild Predictions.”

One prediction that can be banked on, however, is that when a certain doomsday climate of fear serves to increase politicians’ power and taxation capacity, that climate will not soon be changed.

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.