‘Fighting climate change,’ writes Christopher Booker in the Telegraph, ‘has become the single most expensive item on the world’s political agenda.’  One estimate  of the cost is $45 trillion.

The article exposes the ‘outright falsifications’, the ‘bogus science’. the ‘politicization of the IPCC [the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] ‘, and the ‘flimsiness of the case for global warming’.

The ‘hockey-stick’ graph which warmists like Al Gore have used to stir up concern almost to the point of panic is revealed to be a prize piece of nonsense:

The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete fiction. Again and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey stick".

Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today.

This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before.

Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.

This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record.

When its next report came along in 2001, Mann’s graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.

But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.

When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.

Yet governments are relying on such ‘evidence’ to damage our way of life beyond recognition.

Read the whole article here.