Are you now or have you ever been a climate change denier? That might be a question asked at a hearing by Congressional Democrats should they control the next Congress. A platform plank being proposes criminalizes true scientific inquiry in favor of climate orthodoxy and seeks to threaten climate heretics with the full weight of government. As reported by Inside Climate News:

The committee drafting a platform for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party unanimously called on Friday for the Justice Department to investigate fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil Corp., accused of misleading shareholders and the public about the risks of climate change.

This is of the same mantra used against cigarette companies -- the accusation of false and misleading claims and hiding the dangers of using their product. The campaign against Big Tobacco is a template for campaigns against gun manufacturers and now climate change skeptics. Unlike the cigarette companies, both gun manufacturers and climate change skeptics, including fossil fuel defenders, have science and the Constitution on their side.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms and statistics confirm that more guns mean less crime. The First Amendment guarantees an open debate on climate and the impact of fossil fuels on a climate whose changes, the evidence confirms, is both natural and cyclical.

The Democrats are the direct descendants of those who put Galileo on trial in 1633 for questioning the “settled science” that the sun revolved around the earth. Those who question the “settled science” of climate change, particularly fossil fuel companies like Exxon, must be criminally punished for suggesting in effect, like Galileo, that the sun does not revolve the earth. As the Daily Caller reports:

The drafting committee, led by DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, has decided to back ongoing investigations by mostly Democratic state attorneys general into ExxonMobil’s stance on global warming.

Currently, AGs from California, Massachusetts, New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands have launched investigations of Exxon, and at least two AGs have demanded records on conservative think tanks and scientists skeptical of global warming. Such targeting has only fueled calls that these investigations are an attack on free speech.

New York AG Eric Schneiderman was the first to launch an investigation into Exxon, based on reporting from eco-left wing reporters at InsideClimate News and Columbia University. Schneiderman hosted a conference in March with other AGs to announce more investigations into Exxon.

Among those testifying before the Democratic platform committee was one Michael Mann. Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times noted both his appearance and at least one contradiction to his claims based, not on computer models, but on actual empirical observation:

Leading climate doomsayer Michael Mann recently downplayed the importance of climate change science, telling Democrats that data and models “increasingly are unnecessary” because the impact is obvious….

Mr. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, spoke before the committee June 17 in Phoenix… Mr. Mann told the panel that “the signal of climate change is no longer subtle, it is obvious,” citing hurricanes, flooding in Texas and South Carolina, the California drought and “record heat” in Arizona.

Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline.

A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Mann might also be remembered as one of the participants in what Investor’s Business Daily dubbed a “tree-ring circus” – the Climate-gate scandal. As IBD noted at the time:

Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in 2009, when emails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. In one email sent to Mann and others, CRU director Philip Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

"I've just completed Mike's nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline (in global temperatures)," the email read.

It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that helped bring down the global warming house of cards.

The graph created by professor Mann and his colleagues carefully selected and manipulated tree-ring data to supposedly prove that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts -- in a pattern resembling a hockey stick -- in the 20th century due to man-made greenhouse gases. Mann et al. performed the neat trick of making the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

“Hiding the decline” and any actual evidence that global warming hype is nothing more an attempt by climate change scammers to impose what has become a religion. MIT Professor Richard Lindzen is quoted in the Daily Caller questioning the tenets of this new religion:

Throughout history, governments have twisted science to suit a political agenda. Global warming is no different, according to Dr. Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions,” writes Lindzen in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons…

Lindzen compares global warming to past politicized scientific movements: the eugenics movement in the early 20th Century and Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. However, the MIT professor argues that global warming goes even beyond what these past movements in terms of twisting science.

“Global Warming has become a religion,” writes Lindzen. “A surprisingly large number of people seem to have concluded that all that gives meaning to their lives is the belief that they are saving the planet by paying attention to their carbon footprint.”

The goal is to use climate change as a means to increase government power over every aspect of our lives, what we make, how we make it, what energy we use, what cars we drive, even what food we eat. The scientific record, as IBD notes, shows that climate change is a scam:

…a paper published recently in the journal Global Environmental Change found that carbon dioxide emissions are essentially self-regulating and that after countries reach a higher GDP level, CO2 emissions either stabilize or even decline, without the need for carbon taxes or carbon capture technology.

Here in the U.S., the fracking revolution has released from our vast shale formations vast natural-gas deposits that have done more to reduce carbon emissions than any IPCC report.

A study published late last year by the Energy Information Administration reported that the "carbon intensity" of the electricity produced in the U.S. actually fell by 13% from 2007 to 2012.

British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton recently pointed out at Marc Morano's Climate Depot that the "Great Pause" in global temperatures -- now at 18 years and counting -- has occurred even as carbon dioxide concentrations have risen.

This 18-year period constitutes roughly half the satellite observation period that began in 1979.

Physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute notes that the warming pause since 1997 has occurred while atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased 25%.

"CO2 is responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring... and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring," he states.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but the source of all plant and animal life. Even if emissions were a threat, and they are not, it's prosperity and the technology that comes with it, such as fracking, that reduce overall emissions in the atmosphere.

And now the high priests of the global warming religion are demanding what other false religions have demanded -- human sacrifices upon their altar.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.