As the “science” behind man-made global warming has been increasingly discredited, the story has changed. Now it’s not about saving the environment but about redistributing wealth, says a leading member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ottmar Edenhofer, a co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III and a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, 2007 (its latest), recently said, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Edenhofer told a German news outlet (NZZ AM Sonntag): “Basically, it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”

“First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community,” said Edenhofer. Thus the developers of coal and oil should pay reparations in the form of global carbon emission rights and taxes. Investors Business Daily commented “U.N. Warm-mongers are seeking to impose a global climate reparations tax on everything from airline flights and international shipping, to fuel and financial transactions.”

The Cancun agreement set up a “Green Climate Fund” to administer assistance to poor nations suffering from floods and drought due to global warming. The European Union, Japan and the United States have led pledges of $100 billion per year for poor nations up to 2020, plus $30 billion in immediate assistance.

The agreement says it “recognizes that deep cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions are required according to science” and calls for “urgent action” to cap temperature rises. But this chart gives lie to such claims. You can clearly see that on a multimillion-year scale global temperatures have been confined to a steady band unrelated to even huge changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Does this graph reveal any need for “urgent action” “according to science?” Yet at the Cancun conference, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned, “Nature will not wait….Science warns that the window of opportunity to prevent uncontrolled climate change will soon close.”

The window of opportunity that is going to close is not a scientific one but a political one—because more and more people are realizing that global warming alarmism is based on phony science and outright lies.