The climate of our planet is forever changing. Nothing new about that. What is new – what has happened over the last few decades – is the attempt by authoritarian busybodies at the UN and in governments and organizations all over the West to make us pay to stop the climate changing. Which, of course, is an impossibility. But that does not deter them from trying to extort money from us.

From an editorial at Investor’s Business Daily:

Climate Deceit: Just when you think the climate change lunacy couldn’t get any worse, the U.N.’s climate-crats up the ante. Meeting in Bonn, Germany, for yet another unneeded climate conference, attendees are now demanding $300 billion a year more to help less-developed nations cope with anticipated climatic warming. Are they kidding?

By the way, that $300 billion is in addition to the $100 billion that the world’s governments have already promised to deliver under the Paris Climate Agreement. So now they’re asking for a total of $400 billion a year in climate welfare for the developing world. No sane government would sign on to such a scam. Which of course means that most of them probably will.

There’s really no end to this insanity. To make it worse, the proposal before the Bonn climate talks calls for the added taxpayer-funded cash to be doled out not by the governments themselves, or even the UN. No, the money will be channeled through existing nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs.

In other words, left-wing green groups around the world will become the conduits for billions of dollars in money handed out to ethically challenged, nondemocratic governments. Think there might be a tiny temptation for corruption there?

As one green group leader put it, NGOs, not the UN, need to dole out all this money because “It’s so tedious to set up an institution and get it going, and make sure the money reaches the intended people.”

Such a scheme will no doubt lead to massive looting and fraud by green groups, which will suddenly hire massive new staffs to handle their new duties, and pay for it all through enormous “handling fees”, “service charges”, and other nontransparent charges paid for by American taxpayers. Basically, it’s a financial model designed to create global fraud.

All of this is based, mind you, on the purely hypothetical future threat that global warming supposedly poses to low-income nations.

“What stands out most clearly is that there isn’t currently enough funding to even begin thinking about financing loss and damage, with available climate, development, risk reduction and disaster recovery financing all falling short by an order of magnitude,” said a statement by “researchers” at Berlin’s Heinrich Böll Foundation.

Of course, apart from its inherent fraudulence, this is all ridiculously wasteful of scarce resources, in particular, the developed world’s financial capital.

Why wasteful? Well, let’s start with the most obvious and most important point of all: For 19 years, there has been no significant warming in the atmosphere. None. Atmospheric temperature readings — the most comprehensive and accurate temperature data available — taken by satellite show this clearly.

But what about all those highly complex mathematical climate models that show, given the rising amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, that future temperatures will soar — requiring the spending of that $400 billion a year just so poor nations can survive the rising temperatures?

In point of fact, the climate models used by the UN to “predict” the future are all but useless. The UN has in the past used more than 70 climate models as the basis of its predictions that the climate will get much warmer in the future. The only problem is, none of those models can accurately predict [sic: we suggest “depict” – ed] past climate, much less the future.

As the U.N. itself admirably admitted back in 2007: “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

And yet, we’re supposed to be laying out not just hundreds of billions, but trillions of dollars every year to prepare for the possibility of global warming and …  forestall it.

Indeed, we already spend some $1.5 trillion globally on mitigating global warming, according to Climate Change Business Journal. Put in perspective, that’s roughly equivalent to all online retail sales globally.

And yet, as climate skeptic and statistician Bjørn Lomborg has noted, even if you take the models seriously and if every nation on earth lived up to its commitments to slash output of CO2 and all other greenhouse gases by 2030, the net reduction in predicted temperature would be just 0.048 degrees Celsius — about 1/20th of a degree. That is a rounding error. Nothing, really.

Despite all this, the UN and its enviro-socialist allies would have all of the world’s developed economies march lockstep off the cliff of global warming, if they could. They’ve even suggested making climate-change denial a crime. That’s extremism of the worst sort, and intolerable for a free nation to support.

We have suggested before, and we will repeat now, what the only rational response to such financial and scientific lunacy should be: to cease all cooperation with the UN on its global warming schemes — which amount to little more than a massive effort to redistribute wealth from rich nations to poor nations, and to put all free people directly under the controlling thumbs of global bureaucrats.

That means we should pull out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which President Trump promised to do as a candidate, but has yet to do as president. It’s a costly fraud perpetrated on the America people by morally preening global socialists.

The UN must be destroyed!

 From Power Line:

Professor [Frank] Tipler notes the discreditable role played by Obama’s chief science adviser, the left-wing partisan John Holdren:

 AGW supporters are also bringing back the Inquisition, where the power of the state is used to silence one’s scientific opponents. The case of Bjorn Lomborg is illustrative. Lomborg is a tenured professor of mathematics in Denmark. Shortly after his book, "The Skeptical  Environmentalist," was published by Cambridge University Press, Lomborg was charged and convicted (later reversed) of scientific fraud for being critical of the "consensus" view on AGW and other environmental questions. Had the conviction been upheld, Lomborg would  have been fired. …

 I find it very disturbing that part of the Danish Inquisition’s case against Lomborg was written by John Holdren, Obama’s new science advisor. Holdren has recently written that people like Lomborg are "dangerous." I think it is people like Holdren who are  dangerous, because they are willing to use state power to silence their scientific opponents.

Finally, he points out how toxic the combination of government (which is to say, politics) and science can be:

 I agree … that the AGW nonsense is generated by government funding of science. If a guy agrees with AGW, then he can get a government contract. If he is a skeptic, then no contract. 

 This is why I am astounded that people who should know better, like Newt Gingrich, advocate increased government funding for scientific research. We had better science, and a more rapid advance of science, in the early part of the 20th century when there was no  centralized government funding for science. Einstein discovered relativity on his own time, while he was employed as a patent clerk. Where are the Einsteins of today? …  

 Science is an economic good like everything else, and it is very bad for production of high quality goods for the government to control the means of production. Why can’t Newt Gingrich understand this? Milton Friedman understood it, and advocated cutting off government  funding for science.