Every now and then I write a piece that makes the Greenies’ heads explode.

This was one of them – ‘Global Warming’ Is A Myth Say 58 Scientific Papers In 2017 – and I can quite understand why.

If there’s a thing the climate alarmists loathe more than almost anything, it’s being schooled on science by an English major who last used a bunsen burner in anger around the time Kajagoogoo were in the Billboard Hot 100, was always really quite crap at growing copper sulphate crystals, and who, in any case, doesn’t take any of the PhDs who bang on about “global warming” nearly as seriously as they’d like to be taken because he thinks they’re a bunch of liars, incompetents, green activists, money grubbers and grant troughers on the make who have about as much to do with the scientific method as Bill Nye’s left testicle.

So naturally, whenever I come up with another hugely popular (over 32,000 Facebook shares; over 10,000 comments) science-based demolition of the climate scam, the Greenies get angry. Incredible Hulk, angry. What they’d like to do, ideally, is come up with some kind of widely-read uber-rebuttal which proves once and for all that James Delingpole is the lyingest liar that ever lied about science and that Breitbart is totally evil and irresponsible (and lying, obviously) for publishing his mendacious dross.

Tragically, about the best they can ever manage is stuff like this.

It comes from a site called Climate Feedback, an entity set up last year at the height of the left’s “fake news” witch hunt, hosted and primarily funded by the University of California Merced’s Center for Climate For Communication – ie your tax dollar at work… – and describing itself as a “Signatory” of something called “International Fact-Checking Network.”

It purports to be a thoroughgoing and damning scientific rebuttal to my Breitbart piece, written by expert PhDs.

There’s just one problem with it.

It doesn’t actually rebut anything I said in my piece.

This is why I ignored the politely passive-aggressive message I got from Climate Feedback requesting that I “issue a correction” to my article. Well sure. I’d love to oblige since you ask so nicely. But how exactly do you issue a correction to an article which doesn’t actually contain any errors?

For chapter and verse on why Climate Feedback‘s pathetic response is so utterly lame-assed, tragically stupid and wrong – as we Oxford literature graduates say – you really should read this elegant demolition by Jaime Jessop. I like her Pythonesque title: Climate Feedback Rates Dellers’ Latest Effort – Not The Sceptics’ Messiah, Just A Very Naughty Boy.

Jessop has done what the Climate Feedback PhDs should have done but so signally failed to do: she actually read my piece.

She understood that my headline was a bit naughty – ‘Global Warming’ Is A Myth Say Scientific Papers In 2017 – not because it was untrue but because it is heavily dependent on a very specific definition of the phrase ‘Global Warming.’

This I proceeded to explain in the body of the piece:

By “global warming” these papers don’t, of course, mean the mild warming of around 0.8 degrees Celsius that the planet has experienced since the middle of the 19th century as the world crawled out of the Little Ice Age. Pretty much everyone, alarmists and skeptics alike, is agreed on that. Rather, they mean “global warming” in the sense that is most commonly used today by grant-troughing scientists, and huxter politicians, and scaremongering green activists, and brainwashed mainstream media (MSM) environmental correspondents. “Global warming” as in the scary, historically unprecedented, primarily man-made phenomenon which we must address urgently before the icecaps melt and the Pacific islands disappear beneath the waves and all the baby polar bears drown. What all these papers argue in their different ways is that the alarmist version of global warming — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) — is a fake artefact.

Actually there is one mistake in the piece. Carried away by the flow of my invective, I spelt “huckster” wrong. But apart from that it’s bang on the money. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming theory really is a busted flush – and has been for many years. Almost all the scientific evidence indicates that this is so.

Let me reiterate why very simply in a way you really don’t need a PhD to understand.

We know that since about 1850 global mean temperatures have risen by about 0.8 degrees C. According to anthropogenic global warming theory, a significant proportion of this has been caused by industrial – ie man-made CO2 – and we should be worried about this because man has never been able to influence climate in such a way before.

But we also know that there have been times throughout history – both in the fairly well-documented last two millennia, and also much further back – when temperatures rose and fell by at least this much, sometimes in a shorter space of time.

Given that this is so, how can we be sure that the most recent rise is down to man-made CO2 when all the previous ones in history weren’t?

This is one of the key planks in the argument used by climate skeptics when criticizing man-made global warming theory. It’s not that they doubt the possibility that man-made CO2 might be a factor in global warming. Rather, it’s simply that they have yet to see convincing evidence that proves beyond all doubt that this is the case, let alone that these modest recent increases in global temperature represent any kind of problem.

Hence the significance of those 58 scientific papers published in 2017. None of them says directly “Man-made global warming is a myth.” But then, they don’t need to and anyway that’s not how science works. They simply demonstrate in their different, slightly arid, dully rigorous, microscopic ways that climate has always been subject to natural and regional variability. From which we can in turn infer that the recent climate scaremongering is largely the invention of a handful of dishonest and politically motivated activists.

I wasn’t going to bother explaining any of this. Breitbart is now the world’s biggest conservative news site, read by millions, while Climate Feedback’s readership – judging by the handful of self-righteous tweets I’ve received – is mainly confined to basement dwellers, Mummy’s boys, weird, angry Australians and the climate science equivalent of those Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific islands who don’t yet know the Emperor has surrendered.

But Jaime Jessop’s demolition job deserves recognition for the patient and painstaking way it unravels all the rhetorical tricks used by Climate Feedback in its dishonest attempts to undermine my article.

Also, though I really, genuinely don’t care what these loons think, I suppose it is important on some level not to let them get away with it.

The tricks they use are all to familiar to me because I’ve encountered them many times over the years.

I suppose, though, if you weren’t aware of them, you might look at the Climate Feedback article and go: “Hmm. Well these guys do sound like they know what they’re talking about. One’s a Physical Oceanographer from the British Antarctic Survey; another’s a Professor at McGill University. And there’s all sorts of complicated sciency stuff in there like ‘To see the clearest fingerprints of the extra energy added to the climate system from fossil fuel burning, you have to look at the energy content of the entire climate system over the last several decades (most of the extra energy has gone into the ocean [Levitus et al. 2012]*)’ which I don’t quite understand but which looks pretty impressive.”

Don’t worry. This is what’s known as “blinding the reader with science.” It’s how these charlatans roll. It’s only one notch up from that paper the other day about how penises cause climate change.

Just judge my piece on what it said – not on what it didn’t say but these desperate alarmists are trying to claim it did.

What I said was 100 per cent accurate. Which is why these guys are so angry. They don’t like it up ’em, do they?