Speaking in Milan in the lead up to the Glasgow Cop 26 global warming summit, professional truant, Greta Thunberg, lamented that despite countries around the world vowing to meet ‘ambitious targets’, the climate crisis was continuing to escalate. ‘Build back better, blah blah blah,’ she said, referencing the words of President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. ‘We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah blah blah. Hope is telling the truth….’

How right she is. There was a time before the global warming bandwagon got rolling and before Big Pharma controlled medicine, that people could put their trust in scientists. But no longer. Ideology and money shape the world’s perceived scientific knowledge and truth comes a distant last.

So much that passes for science these days lacks rigour or is unfalsifiable; the minimum requirement for a scientific claim. Rather than enlightenment through rational debate, today’s scientific method relies on critics being silenced. Professor Peter Ridd lost his job at James Cook University for daring to disprove the prevailing doctrine that global warming was destroying the Great Barrier Reef. Increasingly, the truth awaits the conscience of retired scientists and whistleblowers.

Just how corrupt science has become was recently highlighted by respected science blogger, Joanne Nova.

She featured a computer scientist’s discovery that to get published and to promote their ideological credentials, ‘organised’ and ‘sophisticated’ fraudsters have repeatedly tricked esteemed journals like Nature and publisher Elsevier ‘not just by hyping up, adjusting and exaggerating their cherry-picked papers and incompetent models, but with fake e-mail addresses’. In some cases, tricksters who posed as scientists were invited to guest-edit issues which they then filled with sham papers. Thanks to these revelations, hundreds of articles must now be retracted. Elsevier is withdrawing 165 articles currently in press and plans to retract another 300. As Ms Nova writes, ‘Western civilisation is paying trillions of dollars to change the weather based on ‘The Science’, according to peer review — which appears to have no more intellectual prowess than a Nigerian 419 email scam’.

In medicine it seems money more than ideology rules. Drug and device trial studies that are sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to reveal statistical results and conclusions that favour a sponsor’s product. Stanford University epidemiologist, John Ionnidis, looked at the forty-nine most-cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals and discovered, of 34 replicated claims, 41 per cent had effectively been falsified.

In climate and medicine, computer models have become the weapon of choice, offering incontrovertible proof of an impending apocalypse. Intended to silence opposition and frighten the populace, the cherry-picked data is frequently kept secret, leaving the models neither verifiable nor refutable.

It is now common for weather bureaus to use computer modelling to adjust historical temperatures to demonstrate a warming bias. It’s why the 23 ‘holy grail’ climate models relied upon by global warming activists are daily proven wrong by millions of weather balloons and satellites.

Unconvinced? It took a whistleblower, one of two ‘principal scientists’ within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to expose that temperatures chosen for a study published in Science six months before the critical Paris climate conference, were ‘adjusted’ to show there had been no slowdown in global warming since 2000. This was intended ‘to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’. Subterfuge appears to be the hallmark of climate science.

Take the Paris Agreement. Even before the ink agreeing to limit warming to 2.0 degrees Celsius was dry, an apocryphal 1.5 degrees ambition appeared from nowhere and became the new target. UN institutions and central bankers seized upon this mission creep to bully developed nations into committing to achieve zero emissions by 2050. Billionaire rent-seekers and a coalition of banks, insurers and asset managers leapt at the idea, eager to cash in on the expected $200 trillion investment bonanza.

This public/private complex is determined to prevent professional managers from making their own assessments of ‘the growing risk that the worsening impacts of climate change and the transition away from fossil fuels pose to the financial sector’. They must abandon past practices or suffer personal shaming and institutional financial penalties. Under this new world order, governments which condone ‘unacceptable’ behaviour face trade sanctions.

But wait. The twelve-month running mean temperature for the world in 2021 is dropping fast and is likely to be well below the 1970-2015 trend line. And while  anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory predicts warming to be fastest in the polar regions, Antarctica has just experienced its coldest six months period and coldest daily temperature since measurements began 64 years ago. The linear trend over the past 35 years has fallen by almost three degrees and has accelerated since 2000.

It also appears that Arctic sea ice has stabilised. There have only been three years since 2007 with lower ice extent than that year and the average of the last ten years is greater than 2007’s extent.

These phenomena may just be aberrations. But what if they’re not? Climate change is not linear. Since time began, the planet has experienced prolonged cooling periods, the last episode being between 1940 and 1975. What if there is another? And, given the dodgy scholarship behind it, what if AGW theory was actually a hoax all along?

Certainly the zealotry driving the global warming campaign is no hoax. It is eerily reminiscent of Mao Zedong’s fanatical Great Leap Forward which ended in famine and the deaths of 40 million Chinese. Using climate change for cover everything, not least the manic phasing out of fossil fuels, is being recklessly gambled on a new, authoritarian, social contract, dubbed the Great Reset. There is no Plan B. Regrettably, like Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the conclusion to this experiment is predictable. The world’s poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. Blah, blah, blah indeed.