Not news to us, but Melanie Phillips says it so well:

It’s over – but its adherents will never admit it. Just as the exposure of the excesses of Stalinism drove many true believers into an ever more fanatical and deluded defence of Soviet communism, so the conclusive destruction of anthropogenic global warming theory is provoking ever more fantastical contortions by warmist zealots who, contrary to all reputable evidence, claim that the planet is about to turn into a furnace and (pace Bob Geldof) it’s all over for the human race.

The recent release of the IPCC’s Final Draft Report of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis revealed, beyond any measure of doubt, the intellectual vacuity, sophistry, and outright corruption of the AGW industry. Presented as an authoritative statement of the current state of climate change evidence, it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, it wasn’t even any kind of statement of evidence. It was instead a politicised draft summary of evidence that was to be amended to ‘ensure consistency between the full Report and the Summary for Policy-Makers’. As Lewis Carroll might have said: conclusions first, rigged evidence to follow.

Her conclusions are also sobering in another direction, not just the effect on the poor which have been devastating and are likely to get worse, but on the standing of science, which the AGW crowd have taken down with them:

But the implications of this epic scam are even more serious and wide-ranging. For what the warmists have done is nothing less than to undermine public confidence in science itself. Science is a synonym for truth-telling, for the exercise of reason, for open-eyed inquiry and the absolute integrity of following where the evidence leads.

But wrapping themselves in the mantle of science, the warmists have utterly corrupted it: making the evidence fit prior conclusions, suppressing inconvenient truths that blow AGW theory into the stratosphere, tampering with and distorting the facts in order to serve a political agenda, pressurising and intimidating scientists who have tried to tell the truth about nothing-out-of-the-ordinary climate change. With AGW zealots pumping out propaganda under the guise of ‘science’, how is the public to be expected to believe scientists when they do tell the truth about where the evidence leads?

For ultimately, this is not even just about science. It is about truth, evidence and rational thought. The real casualty of the AGW scam is surely reason itself.

The “science is settled” has become a laugh line for a reason.