The Hamburg G-20 is over, and the fascist thugs who provided its violent backdrop can now take a well deserved rest.  Not so their numerous sympathizers on the left, who must spin the post-confab narrative in the proper direction. 

Two such narratives have emerged to date: that President Trump and America are no longer relevant and that the Paris Accord is irreversible.  The former is the purview of Trump-haters in the media who nine months ago signed up for wishful thinking as their preferred reality and will never abandon it.  The latter is the domain of Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and her elite cohorts, whose entire world threatens to collapse if global warming is not there to prop it up.  The reason for that is simple.  The European Union and much of the leftist cabal that rules the "international community," including the United States until recently, decided a long time ago that global warming is real and began instituting policies designed ostensibly to prevent it, such as renewable energy.  These policies have already proven hugely inefficient and costly, but at least they had the faux aura of "science" on their side.  If "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW) now proves to be a hoax, they will be exposed for the fools they are.

There are other supporters of AGW, however, and most of them are neither fools like Merkel nor rent-seeking solar and wind crony capitalists.  They are dyed-in-the-wool doctrinaire socialists who aim at nothing less than destroying capitalism by using what Plato called "noble lies" to legitimate unpalatable policies – i.e., environmental regulations.  Perhaps the best recent example of that is Robert Heilbroner, an American academic socialist.  Heilbroner was honest enough to admit, as the Soviet Union collapsed, that socialist economics is inferior to capitalism.  But he remained hopeful that "the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment" could somehow be used to destroy capitalism.  This is exactly what the Paris Agreement had in mind by instituting a giant international income redistribution scheme and a planned economy matrix on the free world over Obama's signature.

Heilbroner was also honest in admitting that Ludwig von Mises was right in arguing that socialism would never work, but it took him 50 years to see that through the intellectual fog of American establishment economics.  Fortunately, there might be a chance that we won't have to wait 50 years to see the demise of AGW as the current reincarnation of socialist economics.

News has now come that Michael Mann, a "world leading climate change scientist" to the AGW zealots, has refused to submit the data behind his infamous "hockey stick" graph in a defamation lawsuit against a Canadian scholar and another one against noted conservative writer Mark Steyn.  He may now be in contempt of court in Canada and the United States both.  For those who have not followed the arcana of the AGW debate, Mann's "hockey stick" graph is nothing if not the proof positive of global warming for his acolytes.  By putting together two different graphs, Mann makes 400 years (900-1300) of medieval global warming, when temperatures were much higher than today, disappear.  Some call that fraud, others, like Mann's friend, Phil Jones, of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, "Mike's nature trick to hide the decline."  Whatever the case, Mann's fraudulent stick is a key piece of evidence in the IPCC 2001 assessment and has been cited hundreds of times in the AGW literature.  Without it, there is not much left to global warming.

If this is the case, little new ground will be broken.  The history of American environmentalism is chock-full of intellectual charlatans who become famous seemingly because they were wrong in virtually everything they said.  It's difficult to escape the impression that they're famous exactly because they are charlatans.  On the occasion of the first Earth Day in 1970, Harvard biologist George Wald assured us that civilization will end "within 15 or 30 years."  Former Obama science adviser John Holdren wrote in a global ecology textbook in 1971 that 1 billion will die of famines by 2020 due to a "new ice age."  Senator Gaylord Nelson predicted in 1970 that within 25 years, between 75% and 80% of all animals will be extinct.  Population expert and author of the bestseller The Population Bomb Paul Ehrlich asserted that by the year 2000, England would not exist.  The Club of Rome claimed in 1972 that the world will run out of oil by 2003.  Instead, reserves (in 2016) were estimated at 1,707 billion barrels, the highest ever.

Not such noble lies, it seems.

Alex Alexiev is chairman of the Center for Balkan and Black Sea Studies (cbbss.org) and editor of bulgariaanalytica.org.  He tweets at twitter.com/alexieff and can be reached at alexievalex4@gmail.com.