With seven late-night TV hosts abandoning comedy for “Climate Night“ (Sept. 22), the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporting that the Earth is on a “catastrophic pathway,” and over 200 medical journals denouncing global warming’s “catastrophic harm to health,” we are being inundated with a tsunami of climate propaganda.

One must ask who still believes these tired old canards? The media have been hysterical about the climate since NASA scientist James Hansen made some outlandish predictions in 1988. Former Vice President Al Gore famously predicted that global warming would cause the world to end by 2016.

According to polling data comedy host Stephen Colbert presented, believers are mainly young people for whom all of this is new. Those old enough to have seen the previous cycle of predictions go bust are more skeptical.

The seven hosts emphasized that climate change is “here now.” So, we should be seeing a convincing amount of warming in the temperature record. But this is not the case. According to satellite data, global temperatures peaked in 2016. The Earth is refusing to obey “the scientists” and warm as commanded. I advise everyone to visit Dr. Roy Spencer’s site, where he compiles the satellite data.

The claim that 97 percent of scientists endorse the alarmist interpretation is a fraud. It is based on an analysis of journal abstracts. Sixty-seven percent of the abstracts in the sample did not express any position and were disregarded. Counts of abstracts show only what type of research the foundations are paying for. A vote by the members of the professional societies would give us a better sense of what scientists think.

The theory of global warming is not a creation of climate scientists, a field that did not exist until quite recently, or even meteorologists. The idea of global warming as a potential catastrophe originated with planetary scientist Carl Sagan. In 1960, Sagan proposed a “very efficient greenhouse effect” to explain the high surface temperature of Venus. Ever since then, alarmists have suggested that the Earth is just a few SUVs away from a Venus-like catastrophe.

Venus’s atmosphere is 92 times thicker than Earth’s and is predominately carbon dioxide. The planet is actively volcanic and has an internal source of heat. Venus’s surface temperature is so easy to explain now that it’s overexplained without resorting to the greenhouse effect.

On Earth, carbon dioxide is a trace gas. It accounts for 410 parts per million in the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is vastly overshadowed by water vapor. In fact, water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse. This single fact should have been the nail in the coffin of the global warming theory a long time ago.

Despite the absurdity of Sagan’s Venus analogy, the environmental community embraced the global warming theory in the late 1970s. The movement was already committed to energy conservation and renewables because of the energy crisis of the 1970s. The new cause allowed these proposals to survive the end of the energy crises.

Some 56 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds around the world say that humanity is doomed, according to Colbert. Being a global warming believer sounds awfully depressing. Although we have only a few years left on this planet, no one cares enough to do anything about it, as Colbert put it.

The only country that is on track to fulfilling its commitments under the Paris treaty is The Gambia. Yet climate change ranks only No. 15 as a policy issue for Americans, according to Pew Research.

Why worry about global warming at all if it is a hopeless cause?

The resolution to this paradox is that liberals see the climate as a way to get more power for themselves and don’t concern themselves about whether the end of the world is actually coming or not. In short, global warming is vital for you, but not for them.

Colbert’s comments on Climate Night support this view. “I’m a huge hypocrite. I’ll never do anything that’s inconvenient for me,” he told his audience. Government action would have to force people to select the right choices, he explained.

Peter Kauffner lives in Sequim, Washington State.

Image: Stephen Colbert preaching the climate change gospel. YouTube screen grab.

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