Earlier this week, we editorialized about the Great Green Grift of the climate hustlers who line their own pockets as well as those of their co-conspirators. Today we dig into the science, which has been repeatedly abused, often abandoned and artfully prostituted to support the global warming racket.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has long been treated as always having the first and last word on global warming. Google’s artificial intelligence says it’s “widely regarded as the world’s leading authority on climate science, providing essential, peer-reviewed assessments that inform international policy.”

We are all expected to regard its conclusions as settled science and surrender to the climate conmen and ideologues — to give them all the money and power they demand.

But it’s not infallible. In fact, it seems that the IPCC has been feeding the Big Lie. The group “has just published the next generation of climate scenarios,” says environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr.

The IPCC has now distanced itself from its own previous claims, were used to goad true believers and leftist activists into political action; to provide a generation of elected officials with a pretense to hike taxes, spending and regulation, thereby wasting as much as $16 trillion; and to create a blueprint for huge, but wholly unneeded, new government outlays that have zero effects on global temperatures and unsurprisingly end up in the pockets of the Democratic machine.

“The new framework has eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades — specifically, RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5, and SSP3-7.0,” says Pielke. “This is an absolutely huge development in climate science which will have lasting impacts across research and policy.”

It turns out that the most alarming possibilities put forth by the IPCC — the same ones used by those among us who insist we have only a few years to save Earth from global warming and have to turn over our lives to their policymaking whims — simply aren’t plausible.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this shift, because, says Pielke, “tens of thousands of research papers have been — and continue to be — published using these scenarios,” while “a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organization have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation.”

It was all, he adds, “built on a foundation of sand.”

It’s lamentable that the political grift extended to the science, thereby corrupting it. It should not have taken so long to “discover” that those claims were bogus. But there was money to be made in the scientific community by ignoring the truth and forecasting disaster.

That’s why science is never settled. Unless they have been corrupted, scientists are expected to challenge each other, not sign onto “consensus” documents that are based on invalid scientific estimates. 

Otherwise, it’s not really science at all — it’s merely a political agenda masquerading as science with great financial benefits.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board