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In the midst of America’s recent government shutdown, a number of politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Gore, and John Kerry made extraordinary claims about the coming climate doomsday. Citing a recent climate report from the United Nations, they all made calls to save the Earth from climate doomsday.

Less than a week later, much of America’s upper Midwest and Chicago face the likelihood of all-time record lows, with life-threatening wind chills of minus 45 to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Meteorologists predict the coldest air in decades across the Northern Plains, Midwest, and Great Lakes.

Yet climate alarmists tell us the record cold and snow are evidence of—you guessed it—manmade global warming!

How did we as a society become so indoctrinated with the theory of man-made global warming that common seasonal weather patterns like snowfall are called signs of global warming?

The credit for climate confusion goes to the climate doomsday theorists. Global warming propagandists, also known as climate alarmists, are good at devising theories that suit their doomsday narrative.

Once understood as a regular winter event, snowfall and extreme wind chills are now considered abnormal. Mainstream media calls extreme cold temperatures and heavy snowfall “unusual occurrences,” caused by warmer-than-usual Arctic temperatures.

Between 2000 and 2010, they claimed that “snowfall will be a thing of the past.” They said the Arctic would disappear, and the subsequent rise in global sea levels would engulf coastal regions.

But nature played the spoilsport.

The reduction in Arctic sea ice levels during the last three decades was neither unprecedented nor significant enough to be paranoid about. Meanwhile, the Antarctic gaining ice, with mass gains outweighing loses. In fact, their combined sea ice levels are more extensive today than ever in the last 10,000 years.

There was no increase in global average temperature over the 18 years and 9 months from February 1997 to October 2015. The warming that resumed in 2016–2017 was not dangerous, and the overall warming rate for the last 40 years is only 0.13 degree Celsius per decade—about half that predicted by the computer models on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel depends—and a far small proportion of the warming predicted by less scientifically oriented journalists and politicians.

2018 saw record low temperatures and snowfall in many parts of North America. It looked nothing like the warm world alarmists sell to the public.

With the sunspot activity—temporary phenomena on the Sun’s photosphere that significantly impacts the temperature on Earth—at its lowest, it will be interesting to see what 2019 and subsequent years hold for us.

Fearing reproach, desperate to defend their alarmist narrative, and harried by the state of climate affairs, the alarmists made a U-turn and declared that increased snowfall is a sign of man-made global warming.

But they did not stop there. They went to on to make more U-turns and now claim that extreme winter weather is a sign of extreme global warming.

Manmade global warming is now said to cause more snow and less snow, higher temperatures and lower temperatures, more rain and less rain, more extreme weather events and fewer extreme weather events, increased prosperity and increased poverty—not to mention a global refugee crisis and regional wars. (Because none of these things, of course, ever occurred before people began driving SUVs!)

Every phenomenon on the face of the Earth is blamed on climate change—as long as the phenomenon is negative. That way the doomsday theorists can capitalize on it.

If anything is extraordinary, it is neither the government shutdown nor the extreme winters, but the ridiculous, pseudo-scientific claims of climate doomsday propagandists who constantly tweak their claims to suit and sustain their narrative.

But one thing is for sure: climate alarmists’ acrobatics will likely continue as the climate change circus becomes ever more desperate to prevent its demise by shocking the world with more extraordinary, and absurd, claims.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.