By Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

Perhaps you are wondering if the world truly has gone mad, or if it only seems that way.  If so, take a look at the climate confab that has just gotten under way in Paris.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.

Time Magazine puts the number of attendees at 40,000.  Holy cow!  That’s 40,000 people, every one of them on the taxpayer dime of some country or other, and every one of them dedicated to the proposition that you must be forced to use less energy and/or have your price of energy jacked up until you can’t afford it any more.  It’s to save the planet!  And all of those 40,000 taxpayer-funded people are also dedicated to suppressing any dissent to climate orthodoxy in order to preserve their own salaries and careers.  And yet all of them somehow fly to Paris on planes burning massive amounts of fossil fuel, not noticing any contradiction between how they demand you live your life and how they live theirs.

Consider the case of our President.  He has called the so-called “climate crisis” “worse than the terrorist threat.” He has also just flown to Paris in Air Force One, and presumably plans to fly back the same way.  An Air Force One 747 consumes 5 gallons of fuel per mile.  It’s 3855 air miles from Washington to Paris, 7710 round trip.  Did I mention that Air Force One is actually two planes?  They always keep a spare 747 within about a half-hour, just in case.  So make that 15,420 air miles at 5 gallons per mile.  A gallon translates to 21.1 pounds of CO2 emissions.  So our dear President is emitting some 1,625,000 pounds of CO2 just for his own flight over and back, more than 800 tons.  For comparison, the average American’s annual carbon emissions are about 20 tons—for everything you do for an entire year.  Just for the President, and just for this one flight over and back, he is emitting 40 years worth of your carbon consumption.  Add in the emissions of his massive entourage on this boondoggle, and it’s a multiple of what you will emit in your entire lifetime.  Wired here calculates the total emission of all the attendees in attending the conference at 300,000 tons of CO2—several hundred times what you will emit in your entire life.  And these people purport to lecture you and restrict you by force on how much energy you can use?

But of course, everybody knows that solving the carbon “crisis” is critically important because “the Earth is warming.” We do know that, don’t we?  Acknowledging that you agree that “the Earth is warming” is the main way that you prove to polite society today that you are not a complete fool, an idiot, a “denier,” an anti-science crazy.  As summarized by CNN here in August:

According to multiple peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists who study climate are overwhelmingly in agreement that the Earth is warming...An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged by many experts as the scientific authority on climate change—says in a major report [in 2013] that it’s unequivocal that the climate is warming.

Of course, the last thing you’d want to do before agreeing that “the Earth is warming” would be to look at the data.  Well, maybe just a peak?  Here’s the latest satellite temperature record from UAH, from the time they first put up the satellites in 1979 and going right up to yesterday:

It’s rather obvious here that the warmest year was 1998, and indeed the peak was in early 1998.  That’s almost 18 years ago!  What does it even mean to say that “the Earth is warming” when the best data show that the warmest time was 18 years ago?  The trend since 1998 is down, not up.  The trend since 1997 is completely flat.

Candidate Ted Cruz was famously quoted by Time back in August as saying

“If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming...The satellite says it ain’t happening ... I’m saying that data and facts don’t support it.”

For that heresy Cruz drew a response from billionaire and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg in a CNN interview on November 25.  Bloomberg referred to “right wing crazies” who reject mainstream climate science, and particularly said he was talking about Cruz:

You’ve got a guy like Ted Cruz...and he says some of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.

Yes, in the field of climate “science,” pointing out that the data refute the hypothesis is now “crazy” and “the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” Who again is the stupid one here?

But, you ask, what about those seemingly monthly press releases from NOAA and NASA, based on ground thermometers rather than satellites, that keep reporting that each successive month and year are “the hottest ever”?  Readers here know that this is what I have referred to as “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Read some previous articles in this series here.  As reported in those articles, numerous non-government-funded independent researchers have gone to check the raw archived temperature data from many stations against the current NOAA and NASA data bases that generate the reports of “hottest ever,” and uniformly they find the same thing: early year data altered downward, and recent year data altered upward, in order to create a warming trend where otherwise none exists.  See, for example, Tony Heller’s Real Science, Paul Homewood’s Not a Lot of People Know That, Joe D’Aleo’s Icecap.

Now for the latest on that.  In Germany, a retired geologist and data computation expert named Friederich Karl Ewert recently decided to follow the lead of Heller, Homewood, D’Aleo, et al., and try his hand at comparing archived raw temperature data from many weather stations to currently-reported temperatures from NASA.  Here is the result, reported on November 20 at No Tricks Zone:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. [...] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears - although it never existed. 

Surprise!  It’s “unbelievable.” Actually not, if you’ve been following this issue at all.  According to my Google search here, the Ewert study has been reported at Breitbart, CNS, No Tricks Zone, Not a Lot of People Know That, Weasel Zippers, Hockey Schtick, Free Republic, The Federalist Papers, and many others—all of them conservative-oriented sources.  But somehow no mention at literally any so-called “mainstream” source: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, etc., etc., etc.  If anybody can find a mention in any mainstream source, I’ll be interested to know.  Have the facts really become this partisan?

So 40,000 people, all on government payroll, meet in Paris to seek to put over on the world’s people a spending/control program of multi-trillions of dollars, all based on so-called “facts” that all are required to believe but are contradicted by the best available data.  Our primary media sources systematically suppress the data.  Yes, the world truly has gone mad.