Al Gore Back Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change latest from the climate fiction writers. Lacking observable evidence, Al Gore back climate hucksters just crank up the volume

Why, if carbon dioxide is so bad, does theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insist on going into extended hyperventilation every couple of years?

Probably because the few people who ever took seriously its predictions of cataclysm have long since ceased to do so.

But the IPCC isn't going to come up with another product to sell. It put all of its eggs in the climate-disaster basket years ago and now it's well and truly stuck.

So this week, the IPCC marketing department gamely released a new round of threats and exhortations — 32 volumes' worth.

With five reports now in hand — representing a quarter century of cooking data,ignoring observable phenomena, twisting the scientific method into a pretzel, crying "wolf!" and generally giving science a black eye — the pattern of escalating hyperbole can be explained by means of a simple and straightforward formula: The level of caterwauling about an anthropogenic climate apocalypse is inversely proportional to the supporting evidence.

Advice to the climate Cassandras: Take a deep breath and hold it. Forever. According to your own theory, if you exhale, you just make things worse for everyone. In fact, first one who exhales loses his grant money.

There, that ought to hold 'em long enough for us non-hysterics to take a look at the latest from the climate fiction writers.

Human activity: Ooooh. The new assessment is that it is "extremely likely" that humans are responsible for climate change. That's up from "very likely" in the last go-around. Being very afraid is out of fashion. Now you have to be extremely afraid.

Global changes: The polar ice melt is now described as "unprecedented over decades to millennia." Decades, millennia; po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to. The planet's ice caps, by the way, are having a banner year. Even north of Cleveland.

Sea level rise: Next century. Just you wait. The computer models say so (because the programmers told them to). Maybe 20 inches. Maybe 39. "Noah" opened over the weekend. Coincidence?

Surface warming pause: There has to be a logical explanation for why the climate fear-mongers have been so wrong for so long now. And there is! All the heat from the global warming that should be happening, but isn't, is hiding at the bottom of the oceans. Because heat always does that. There's no place like the bottom of theMariana Trench to work up a sweat.

As usual, none of it adds up but the bottom line never changes: WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Some of us will die because, the new report notes, the increase in greenhouse gases will make it impossible to grow crops.

Think about it: You always move the plants you want to kill right away into the greenhouse, where it's warm, right? Plants hate warmth. That's why Alaska is cornfields as far as the eye can see, while only the occasional tuft of tundra grass lives in Kansas.

Other people will die because the rising oceans will drown them. We've all seen them — the people who dawdle when the lifeguard says, "Clear the beach." You look out there 75 years later and, sure enough, there's a floater or two.

The temptation is to ask whether anyone, anywhere — OK, other than Al Gore and his fellow profiteers — really takes this nonsense seriously anymore.

Yet despite their long-declining credibility, the doomsday hucksters have had no small success in getting legislation passed to impede U.S. industry and energy independence.

Nationally, we've got a Keystone XL pipeline on the drawing board that should have been under construction long ago.

In Ohio, we've got yet another effort brewing to scrap "renewable energy" standards that never should have been passed, because they require utilities tobuy power at artificially high rates. "Alternative energy" rent-seekers wallow insubsidies. Consumers get stuck with the bill.

Political decisions like those are all bound up in the long, wrong fight against fossil fuels, to which global-warming hysteria was supposed to provide the coup de grace.

But the stampede envisioned in Kyoto in 1997 never materialized, the sales pitch has become progressively less believable as time has passed and dire predictions have fizzled, and now the momentum is just about spent. That's why each successive pronouncement from the IPCC is more shrill than the previous.

The Climategate email scandals in 2009 and 2011 made it abundantly clear that the merry pranksters have been making it all up for political purposes all along, but the people who want to damage U.S. energy policy and weaken the U.S. economyare still very much on board. That's why the United Nations is still pushing its scare campaign.

Yeah, we're all gonna die. That's the one thing John Maynard Keynes got right. But no one's demise will have anything to do with anthropogenic climate change, because there's no such thing.

On the way to not dying from it, we all might as well live better by making the most of our energy resources. And that includes fossil fuels.