RUTHFULLY YOURS

Someone should tell Barack Obama and all the potential scavengers attempting to make a haul at COP-21 in Paris this week — global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is over.

Any runway model can tell you — Paris is for new fashions.  Not last year’s retreads. Climate change is so 2009!

Only the neo-Leninist “useful idiots” on the New York Times editorial board still believe in it. The American public certainly doesn’t. Ninety-seven percent now disbelieve it — or, more accurately, put it far on the back burner. Yes, that’s the same number we used to have shoved down on our throats as the percentage of scientists who supposedly believed in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. That proved to be absurd. Yet still the UN persists with its annual fiesta for moral narcissists, almost always in a luxe venue best accessed by carbon-spewing corporate jets.

Well, where better than Paris? Just watch the cholesterol. And don’t worry about ISIS.  They know what’s worth attacking and it’s not this utter balderdash.  (At least people pay attention to a soccer game and a rock concert.)

Not even Stalin during the days of Trofim Lysenko tried to pull off something so scandalous (and anti-science!) as the global warming scam.  And good old Joe made nowhere near as much money for his lies as Al Gore — the D student in geology — did by running around declaring “The ice is melting!  The seas are rising! The storms are raging!” thereby netting himself one billion dollars and an Oscar.  That the seas never rose and the ice never melted and the hurricanes didn’t even happen, in fact literally stopped, is beside the point.  (Well, maybe that last fact is some sort of climate change.) People felt good about themselves.  They believed in Mother Earth, even if they didn’t have anything else to believe in — more likely because they didn’t have anything else to believe in.

Never mind that some scientists are now predicting an era of “global cooling,”and Newsweek and Time  may have been right after all back in the 1970s when they foresaw a mini-Ice Age. It doesn’t fit the narrative, not the current one anyway.  Global warming is “settled science.” That’s the mantra at every cocktail party from Brentwood to Bronxville. That almost none of those people at the parties has heard of the “Maunder minimum” warned about by those scientists matters not.  Most of them have well-heated mansions, well-insulated if the Hudson River freezes over.

Meanwhile, scads of money have been made on the climate scam, most notably by Maurice Strong, the former UN official until recently hiding out in Beijing, and the whole crowd who set up those carbon trading exchanges that flitted briefly through Europe, selling so-called “carbon credits,” until there weren’t any suckers left.  It was always about the money, even when they pretended it was about the en-vir-on-ment. Or, in the immortal words of H. L. Mencken, “When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”

I saw this up close and personal myself while covering COP-15 in Copenhagen for these digital pages back in 2009.  Even then there was something more than vaguely dubious about the enterprise and it seemed appropriate that the conference was taking place in a blinding snow storm, a winter wonderland of global warming.  And what a boondoggle it was! Half the U.S. Congress seemed to be there, all arriving on a chartered jet in Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen. When I ran into Cong. Charlie Rangel in the gift shop of the Marriott, where he was perusing some elegant Scandinavian jewelry, and asked him if he believed in man-made global warming, he stared at me in astonishment.  How could I ask anything so preposterous, he seemed to be saying, questioning the received wisdom of the ages, and turned to the clerk, gesturing toward some silver cufflinks.

Earlier that day I had asked the same question of a delegate sitting beside me at one of the interminable panel discussions.  By chance he came from one of the Pacific Islands said to be in danger of disappearing from the rising ocean level.  His response to my question was much more forthcoming than Rangel’s.  He laughed and shook his head.  Then why are you here, I asked?  “For the money,” he said, still grinning.  And then he punched my shoulder playfully.

So when you see the picture in the Washington Post of Obama, Hollande, et al, dining at the Michelin three-star L’Ambroisie, you don’t have to be Arthur Conan Doyle to figure out what’s going on behind the doors of  these UN global warming conferences.  Those few words above from H. L. Mencken suffice.