Over the last 40 years, I saw events come and go that I thought would expose the greatest deception in history: the claim that human CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming, known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

It was disseminated as the truth through the bureaucrats of national weather offices such as the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO). That organization assigned the members of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which then produced the "science" to support the AGW claim.

It was a classic circular arrangement at both the political and scientific levels.

Most of the researchers who controlled the IPCC were based at or associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In November 2009, a month before a momentous political decision was due on the Kyoto Protocol from the Conference of the Parties (COP 15), 1000 emails were leaked that exposed the corruption of climate science by this handful of people.

The COP was stymied because their decisions were supposed to be based on the IPCC results. I thought the leaked emails, (ironically, even then the leak was blamed on a Russian hacker...) would stop the juggernaut.

The Guardian reporter George Monbiot, a strong supporter of the IPCC and the CRU wrote:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

They hired PR people and set up five controlled whitewash investigations, four in the UK and one at Penn State University in the US.

As Clive Crook wrote in The Atlantic:

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best, they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst, they are patently incompetent and even willfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.

But none of this stopped the juggernaut of the AGW deception.

Too many people had too much invested, and most of the public didn’t understand what was happening.

I despaired.

Then, the light before the dawn appeared, as I explained in my last Rebel article:

While I was in Australia helping Senator Macolm Roberts challenge the government bureaucrats to produce empirical evidence of AGW, Donald Trump won the US Presidential election.

Then came an invitation to appear before significant people on Capitol Hill and a group called “Cooler Heads” at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). This was arranged by Myron Ebell of the CEI who was appointed by President-Elect Trump to oversee the activities of the EPA and climate change.

It is a measure of Trump's well-known efficiency as a developer that Myron was appointed a month before the election. Trump knows that everything must be in place, including people, money, materials, and the proper sequence, on the first day.

On Capitol Hill, Senator Roberts, Tony Heller and I made presentations, similar but shorter, than those we gave in Australia. The audience included members of the Senate, Congress, and their aides, plus members of the public. A broad question and answer session followed.

We then moved to CEI for a question and answer session that lasted about three hours. In addition to Ebell, several members of the Trump transition advisory team on the EPA and climate were present. I can't share the specifics, but a few comments about the tone of the Q and A are appropriate:

It was noted that Trump does not want to eliminate the EPA. As he said publicly on many occasions, we need clean air and water. The real issue is the overreach, over-regulation, and political nature of many of their actions.

Obama used the bureaucracies, and especially the EPA, to carry out his political agenda. Perhaps the most egregious example was an EPA lawsuit against the State of Massachusetts for failing to control CO2 as a "harmful substance." The EPA lost the lawsuit, in my opinion, deliberately, because that created the need for a Supreme Court ruling. The ruling was that the EPA had jurisdiction over CO2 as a "harmful substance." (By, conveniently enough, definitions created by the EPA itself.)

The major discussion at our meeting involved US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Conference Agreement. Lawyers explained that provisions in the Agreement allow for withdrawal after advance notification. However, their final observation was that there was nothing to prevent the US simply walking away.

President Obama created this opportunity by trying to avoid the Constitutional requirement that all treaties require Senate approval. He knew Kyoto failed to get Senate approval and the Paris situation was almost identical. Other nations, who wanted to appear green and join the Agreement, used Obama’s situation to make it non-binding, so they did not have to do anything.

There is little doubt the Trump administration will walk. They are paying most of the cost of the UN climate program and even if they cut back major industrialized competitors, China and India continue to build coal-burning plants.

The Paris Agreement requires developed nations to contribute $100 billion a year to the Green Climate Fund, which was the replacement "transfer of wealth" program that replaced the Kyoto Protocol.

Canada committed $2.65 billion to the fund in 2015 that was in addition to the $300 million contributed by the Harper government. This government funding fits the wry definition of foreign aid that "takes money from the poor people in rich countries, and gives it to the rich people of poor countries."

This money will do absolutely nothing to stop global warming, even if it was a real problem. There are more important needs at home. For example, it is likely that the money would solve all the domestic water supply problems on reservations across Canada.

Sadly, like with all these save the planetary problems, the eyes of the fool are over the horizon. Now, we have Trump, a world leader who is putting his country first, who is not interested in nation building overseas or proselytizing the religion of environmentalism.

It is a pleasure, after all these years, to be involved in bringing sanity, reason, and science to policy making.