Left-wing American shock jock Thom Hartmann – UK readers: think Lenin without the charm, wit or lightness of touch – has told his listeners that “climate change deniers should be in prison.”

“You are paid to lie to people” he told skeptic Paul Driessen on his radio show.

“I am talking about racketeering, organized crime. I am calling you a criminal” said Hartmann, warming to his theme.

“You are killing people…You have five million climate refugees…Dead children, your responsibility….It’s all the consequence of climate change.”

Well I’ve been on Hartmann’s show myself and I know that gibbering hysteria is how he rolls. “Take a chill pill, Thom, baby,” you want to tell him. Or you would if he ever let you get a word in edgewise, which unfortunately he never does. He’s not interested in what you have to say because he already knows all the answers. Which is a shame because if he listened more and frothed and foamed less, he might actually learn something.

On the subject of climate change, for example, he’d learn that people on his side of the argument are just 100 percent wrong. Not one single death, anywhere in the world, ever, can be laid at the door of climate change skeptics – not least because they currently have almost no influence on global environmental or economic policy.

For years, decades even, it’s the alarmists who have held sway. They’re the guys who write the dodgy dossiers – aka the IPCC assessment reports – on which world leaders base their misguided policies; they’re the ones who advised the Pope on his misbegotten encyclical; they’re the activists who infest the UN, the European Union, the cod-scientific institutions (NASA GISS; NOAA; the Royal Society; the National Academy of Sciences; the Climategate Climatic Research Institute at the University of East Anglia; the Met Office, etc) which so assiduously use their weight to advance the green agenda; they’re the green lobbyists from Greenpeace, Oxfam, the BBC, Friends of the Earth, the New York Times, the Guardian and so on who create the false narrative that “global warming” – and not, say, Islamism or Russia or the still-fragile world economy – represents the greatest threat of our lifetime.

Five million climate refugees? Dead children?

I challenge Thom Hartmann to name even one. If he’s talking about the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, well he should know that despite the threadbare efforts of the usual suspects to pin the blame on “climate change”, all the credible evidence suggests that this is about economic migration and about political instability, not about global warming.

As for those five million climate refugees. They’re just a figment. The original figure – 50 million – came from a prediction in a UN Environment Program report in 2005 which even the UN now finds so embarrassing that it tried to erase the figure from its archives.

Meanwhile in the real world, yes people ARE dying. Not from “climate change” but from policies designed, supposedly, to prevent people dying from “climate change.”

Some examples:

In Britain, last winter, an estimated 15,000 people died in fuel poverty – a phenomenon largely the creation of the government-initiated drive to replace cheap fossil fuels with expensive, inefficient “low carbon” renewable energy.

As a result of the Arab Spring, the death toll runs into the tens of thousands. I certainly wouldn’t be so unscrupulous – as the climate alarmists have been – as to use these in defense of my cause. It is, however, an unarguable fact that when agricultural land is instead given over the growing biofuels (for no other reason that they are supposedly eco-friendly), grain scarcity will (ceteris paribus) increase, prices will rise and the areas hardest hit will be places like the Middle East which are heavily dependent on imported cereals. In the US alone, ethanol mandates have resulted in an extra 100 million tonnes per annum of corn grown for biofuel. Had that land been used instead for food it would have produced enough to feed 300 million people.

Then, of course, there’s the rise and rise of diesel-powered cars, currently in the news right now because of the scandal in which VW rigged its emissions tests. Except the real scandal isn’t so much what VW did as it is why there is so much diesel-related pollution in the first place. This was as a direct result of EU-driven policy to encourage drivers to use diesel cars instead of petrol driven ones, on the grounds that their more efficient engines produce less CO2. Perhaps they do. But what they also produce is much deadlier pollution in the form of particulates which, in Britain alone, have been responsible for an extra 5,800 deaths per annum. Since this is a Europe-wide problem we can reasonably extrapolate from this that the death toll from the dash for diesel – solely the result, let us stress of misguided climate change related policy – runs into the tens of thousands.

This list is not exhaustive. And while I’ve limited myself to deaths caused by misguided climate change policy, let’s also not forget the more general misery which Thom Hartmann’s enviroloon chums have inflicted on the world over the years: the raised taxes and increased cost of living; the sclerosis-inducing overregulation; the corruption of science and the diversion of scarce resources from the public purse (ie the hard-pressed taxpayers) to pointless areas of research; the views blighted and the wildlife decimated by bat-chomping bird-slicing eco crucifixes and solar arrays; the children frightened (and misinformed) with tales of guilt and climate doom…

If we’re talking about a criminal conspiracy, Thom Hartmann, I’d say people on your side of the argument have a far more pressing case to answer than any of the people on ours.

But obviously you’re not going to listen to any of this. You never do.