In a sneak preview of their first big “landmark” report on climate change since 2007, the big-government, progressive, eco-radical, globalist types on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations revealed in August that they are absotively, posilutely 95 percent super-duper certain that global warming is definitely happening to a dangerous degree and that human activity is the overwhelming cause behind it.

The flaw in their master plan, however, is that Planet Earth has recently been presenting some counter-narrative quirks to their hotly anticipated findings (I’m not sure who is hotly anticipating them, but I read somewhere that people are, so it must be true), such as the lack of significant warming over the past fifteen years and the “unexpectedly” aggressive growth of arctic ice — and that’s rather inconvenient for a report that considers itself the definitive guide to Settled Science That Is Beyond Contestation.

Exactly how to communicate, if at all, these sensitive data points is rather a delicate matter, via the AP:

Leaked documents obtained by The Associated Press show there are deep concerns among governments over how to address the purported slowdown ahead of next week’s meeting of the IPCC. … Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10 to 15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries. The U.S. also urged the authors to include the “leading hypothesis” that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean. Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. That year was exceptionally warm, so any graph showing global temperatures starting with 1998 looks flat. Using 1999 or 2000 as a starting year would yield a more upward-pointing curve. In fact, every year after 2000 has been warmer than the year 2000. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for skeptics. … Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the IPCC, declined to comment on the content of the report because it hasn’t been made final, but said it would provide “a comprehensive picture of all the science relevant to climate change.”

Wait… does this mean that — gasp — politics often play a role in science?!?! How can this be???