1988 was a barn-burner year for climate alarmists. Then-Sen. Al Gore’s steamy congressional hearing trumpeted a planet on fire, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created to produce pseudo-scientific evidence blaming it on unfair capitalist industrial prosperity-spawned CO2 emissions.Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart explained the real cause for urgency. She told editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”Stewart was wrong. Consequences of that phony science upon environmental and energy regulatory policies matter a great deal. So let’s consider some inconvenient facts.First, no one I know “denies” that climate changes, both warmer and colder, and for better and worse. Not so very long ago, U.S. cooling of about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit between 1945 and 1975 prompted The New York Times and other major news publications to headline “experts” trumpeting the arrival of a new ice age.During “modern times” the global climate has been warming in fits and starts since the last “little ice age” (not a true ice age) ended about 200 years ago. Yet apart from entirely natural 1998 and 2015 ocean El Nino spikes, satellite and weather balloon measurements show no statistically-significant global warming for nearly two decades.U.S. surface records obtained from the most reliable thermometer stations — those not corrupted by local “heat island” influences such as instrument relocations, urban developments or other man-made changes — show no significant warming over the past 80 years. There have been more all-time U.S. cold records than heat records since the 1940s.Based upon the most reliable land surface data (UK Hadley Center, or “HADCRUT”), the average annual planetary warming between 1850 and 2015 is virtually imperceptible . . . and certainly not “dangerous.”Contrary to prevalent fear-mongering, sea levels have been rising at a constant rate of barely 7 inches per century without any measured acceleration. Even the latest 2013 IPCC report states; “It is likely that GMSL [Global Mean Sea Level] rose between 1920 and 1950 at a rate comparable to that observed between 1993 and 2010.”Periodic Arctic warming cycles have been reported by whalers and explorers dating back centuries. Alpine glaciers at Glacier National Park have been receding since the little ice age ended. (Incidentally, polar bear populations are now at a record high.)As for the sensationalized melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a British Antarctic Survey reported that this is “within the natural range of climate variability” over the past 300 years, and that “more dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-19th and 18th centuries.” Overall, the Antarctic ice mass has been steadily growing since first recorded by NASA satellites in 1979. The 2013-2014 expanses exceeded all previous measurements.Regarding that “extreme weather” we’ve been warned about, no category 3-5 hurricanes have struck the U.S. coast since October 2005, setting a record lull since 1900. Both NOAA and the IPCC have admitted that there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of droughts, floods, thunderstorms, or tornadoes in decades. Nor has the number of U.S. wildfires increased.So how much confidence should we place upon IPCC objectivity to guide regulatory policies? Consider but a couple of statements from key inside sources in their own words.As written in a 2007 journal Nature article by Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports: “None of the [global climate simulation] models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state, and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state.”Trenberth associate Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote in an internal email: “Mike [Mann], the [report] Figure you sent is very deceptive . . . there has been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC.”Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), summed up the situation quite clearly. Speaking in 2010, he advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”Or as U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres candidly remarked, the true aim of the recent Paris climate conference was “to change the [capitalist] economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”No, none of this global warming (aka, “climate change”) alarmism is based upon objective science. It never was.