In November 2009, the Hadley Climate Research Unit at the university of East Anglia in Britain* was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an "anthropogenic global warming" myth. The evidence showed that data was tampered with to paint the wished-for canvas, that counter-evidence was deliberately suppressed, that character assassination against climate skeptics was an accepted tactic and that experimental results were falsely replicated. 

A new bundle of “hide the decline” email dumps, known as Climategate 2.0, confirmed that the “climate science” had been cooked and that, in the words of Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, “the new cache offers ample confirmation of the rank politicization of climate science and rampant cronyism that ought to trouble even firm believers in catastrophic climate change… it’s another case of policy-driven science, and not science-driven policy.” Even some of the specialists involved in the enterprise had begun to question or object to the findings as, to quote from the emails, “not statistically significant,” as “truly pathetic,” and as “defending something that increasingly cannot be defended.” No wonder the lead researcher at the East Anglia CRU, Phil Jones, went so far as to recommend deleting all incriminating emails and/or changing the wording of others (Climate Audit, February 23, 2011).

The Hadley fable was thoroughly debunked by Rael Jean Isaac in Roosters of the Apocalypse, which showed in explicit detail that the ostensibly “scrupulous seekers of scientific fact” were really “hardcore zealots” mining “an ever richer vein of chicanery.” In the same year, James Delingpole put out his alphabetary The Little Green Book of Eco-Fascism, as devastating as it is amusing, exploding the Hadley as a coven of plotters. Certain figures in the movement had already made his point for him. In 1989 the late Stephen Schneider, Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University and a vociferous global warmist—who twenty years earlier had been warning the world of an advancing ice age—had already advised his droogs: “So we have to offer scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”  

And there is much that is doubtful. Michael Shellenberger, a longtime climate activist who has now seen the light, has just published Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a balanced account of the subject that remains in the temperate zone of argument. It points to the many “scary scenarios” and exaggerations that the eco-activists have foisted on the public: wood fuel is preferable to fossil fuels, the Himalayan glaciers are melting, the oceans are dying, extreme weather events are on the rise, industrial agriculture is a disaster, massive crop failures are to be expected, and so on, all leading to the collapse of civilization and the looming extinction of human life. Actually, climate is doing fairly well, but you’d never know it attending to so alarmist an agenda.

What is going on here? The climate industry is brewing perhaps the greatest deception of our times. An integral part of this deception is the intent to redistribute First-World wealth to so-called developing countries. Ottmar Edenhofer, former co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, admitted in an interview with Germany’s NZZ Online on November 14, 2010 (reported in Global Warming Science, March 17, 2011), that “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” 

But there is obviously more to it than that. The climate change scam is a cash cow for research scientists, universities and climate institutes on the receiving end of lucrative government grants, which they have no intention of relinquishing. The global warming scenario is also a gold mine for energy companies, crony capitalists and financial speculators, a multi-billion dollar boondoggle in which Big Oil has been replaced by Big Green, the major exploiter and benefactor of the pseudo-ecological scheme. Michael Moore’s new documentary Planet of the Humans, as Charles Battig points out in American Thinker, reveals how “energy corporations gained access to government funding/subsidies for wind turbine and commercial solar power installations,” despite the fact that the unreliability and intermittence of such energy substitutes ensures that “fossil fuel plants will remain the primary energy sources.” 

The plot thickens. Mark Levin’s chapter “On Enviro-Statism” in his book Liberty and Tyranny provides a compendious summary and critique of the various stages of the global warming hoax and how it functions as an instrument of statist control of civil society. Like single-payer medicare and auto-industry bailouts, the myth of global warming enables government to concentrate more and more of a nation’s economy into its own hands, leading eventually to a top-down socialist dispensation and a citizenry dependent on the whims and dictates of an autocratic managerial class. 

The totalitarian mindset is a monstrous thing, and Climatocracy is one of its most arresting contemporary manifestations. Global warming, said Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London, “has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices." Similarly, Glenn Beck in Common Sense warns us about “what is really going on: leaders who want more government control over our businesses, economy and personal lives…need a vehicle to take them there…climate change is that vehicle.”

What it boils down to, according  to Delingpole in Watermelons, is the entwining of “the ideology of the modern environmental movement and the ideology of the liberal-left,” both of which are political cartels of a collectivist bent that “believe in a bigger state” and lobby for “more of our decisions to be made on our behalf by politicians [and] technocrats.” Thus the term “watermelons”: green on the outside, red (or pink) on the inside. 

Perhaps all is not lost. Michael Walsh writing on this site is gratified to note, if not a sea change, let’s say a river change among former climate activists and radical environmentalists who are “defect[ing] to the side of reason” and “joining the community of the sensible.” But it’s not an easy slog for so-called “climate skeptics,” who are regularly slandered as heretics, as paranoid, as clueless and so on. They must often feel like modern-day Quixotes tilting at wind turbines, risking their careers and livelihoods in the process. They know that the issue is not about science at all. Apart from the inevitable cohort of useful idiots who see themselves as world-saviors and Gaia lovers, it’s all about money and power founded on deceit, persuasion and threat.

And there we have it—what the global warming (aka “climate change”) movement, a fit candidate for the dump of history, actually comprises and intends. The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. We are being pummeled into believing that we are facing an existential menace. In 2009, then Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, warned that “We have just four months to secure the future of our planet.” Now, we’re informed that it’s 12 years or maybe, according to teenage wunderkind Greta Thunberg, a mere eight years. The experts at the IPCC give us a decade to change our errant ways—or else! It could be just 18 months, as that renowned climatologist Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh has admonished us. We are constantly on the brink of extinction, it seems. 

Don’t fall for it. 

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*On a personal note: Visiting the University of East Anglia as a conferee in 2005, I recall standing before a strange, bartizan-like structure, a kind of Martello tower fused to an enormous ingot of glass and concrete, and wondering what purpose so bizarre an edifice might possibly serve. It was only later that I learned I’d been standing before the CRU building, described by Ian Wishart in Air Con as “one of the temples of global warming belief,” sheltering a conclave of scientists whose analytic hijinks might have tempted one “to laugh out loud.”

Studded with machicolated windows from which to pour boiling oil and hurl rocks during a siege, it seemed an appropriate pile in the circumstances. Protecting their own, the university syndics, posing as an “International Panel,” released a report attempting to rehabilitate the high priests of climate change sheltering behind their oylets. The boiling oil of bureaucratic rhetoric seems to have been largely effective. Nonetheless, Phil Jones was forced to step down as head of the Unit. The fraud itself, however, gives no indication of abating.