This article from The American Thinker is the only article you’ll ever need to read about global warming. (H/T ECM)

It summarizes how we got to this point, the goals and role of the United Nations in global warming alarmism, and the latest finding by Climate Audit about the hockey stick graph and its curious use (abuse?) of data sets.

What the article is about:

For years, claims that UN climate reports represent the consensus of the majority of international scientists have been mindlessly accepted and regurgitated by left-leaning policy makers and the media at large.  But in the past week or so, it’s become more apparent than ever that those who’ve accused the international organization of politicizing science and manipulating data have been right all along.

Here’s a graph of global temperature, taken from a UN IPCC publication in 1990:

And here’s what you should note about it:

And data derived from sources including tree-rings, lake sediments, ice cores and historic documents bear that position out.  Indeed, it’s abundantly evident that since the last glacial period ended, over 14,000 years ago, the Earth’s climate has undergone multi-century swings from warming to cooling that occur often and with remarkable rapidity.  And not one but three such radical shifts occurred within the past millennium.

The years 900-1300 AD have been labeled the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), as global temperatures rose precipitously from the bitter cold of the previous epoch — the Dark Ages — to levels several degrees warmer than today.  A sudden period of cooling then followed and lasted until the year 1850.  This Little Ice Age (LIA) brought on extremely cold temperatures, corresponding with three periods of protracted solar inactivity, the lowest temperatures coinciding with the quietest of the three (The Maunder Minimum 1645-1710).

And then the need for bureaucrats to control people’s lives reared its ugly head:

During testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing on Climate Change and the Media in 2006, University of Oklahoma geophysicist Dr. David Deming recalled “an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change” who told him that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”  In June of this year, Deming identified the year of that email as 1995 and the source only as a lead author of that month’s Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report.

Many believe that man to be Jonathan Overpeck – which Prof. Deming didn’t deny in an email response — who would later also serve as an IPCC lead author.  So it comes as no surprise that this reconstruction, which did indeed “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,” was featured prominently in the subsequent 2001 TAR, particularly in the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), the highly-politicized synopsis which commands the bulk of media and political attention.

The article cites climate scientist Stephen Schneider as follows in 1989:

“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.”

And then adds:

Twelve years later, Schneider was a lead author of the IPCC’s TAR, the same UN report that formally introduced the delusory Hockey Stick Graph.

And that is how the United Nations began to invent the hockey stick graph, which is the latest prop supporting a made-up crisis to overturn capitalism while simultaneously providing the meaningless lives of the secular-left elite with a false sense of purpose and moral superiority. The hockey stick graph is based on the data that was debunked recently by Canadian statistician Stephen McIntyre. And now maybe we can stop worrying about global warming for good.

The rest of the American Thinker article is here and it continues to tell the rest of the story of the hockey stick graph, focusing on the role of the United Nations and IPCC researchers. This is the best article on global warming I have ever read, and it is snarky all the way through. I don’t know how the author managed to find all of those incredible quotes from the global warming alarmists planning their myths. Print and read!

My recent posts on the hockey stick graph

• MUST-READ: Peer-reviewed article in journal Science says solar activity impacts climate
• CRISIS: Famous global warming hockey stick graph is a hoax
• Princeton physics professor testifies to Senate about global warming