Artificial intelligence has an unintended talent to entertain through its predictability. Challenge elite orthodoxy on global warming and AI will probably lecture you, reminding you that ‘the science is settled’ and that an iron-clad ‘scientific consensus’ governs anthropogenic global warming.

My response to the consensus juggernaut has long been to recall those two wonderful Australian Nobel Laureates, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. For decades, the medical establishment insisted stomach ulcers were caused by stress and diet. They ridiculed Marshall and Warren’s 1982 discovery that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the principal culprit. Their Nobel Prize confirms scientific progress may require defying a consensus, not genuflecting to it.

The orthodox narrative on climate change was challenged by Barack Obama’s former Under Secretary for Science, Steven E. Koonin. In his 2021 book Unsettled, he points out that authoritative research literature and official government climate assessments make it plain that American heatwaves are ‘no more common’ today than in 1900, while the highest temperatures recorded in the United States have simply failed to rise over the past half-century.

That was of course dismissed as heretical by climate catastrophists. But as Bjorn Lomborg said of the book, ‘if we are to make trillion dollar investments, we deserve to be as well informed as possible’.

In April, a study by John R. Christy confirming Koonin’s conclusion that global warming had not occurred in the US appeared in the respected, peer-reviewed journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Headlines should have shaken the climate change establishment to its core. But it was the wrong news. It goes against what is almost a religion, which all major Australian political parties – with the notable exception of One Nation – treat as infallible dogma. This story didn’t make the news.

This quasi-religious belief reflects the decline of the Judeo-Christian faith that has guided the nation since 1788. Man must believe in something, and absent faith, curious political dogmas fill the void.

I learned of Dr Christy’s study from a unique report in that excellent international newspaper, the Epoch Times.

The findings dismantle the relentless assertions that dominate both the media and political discourse: the familiar, breathless claims that we have just survived the hottest day, month, year, or season in human history.

If this were mere hyperbole, it might be dismissed as harmless theatre.

But when public policy relies on these narratives to redirect billions of taxpayer dollars – supported by an uncompromising bureaucracy it ceases to be harmless and becomes genuinely destructive.

As Robert Gottliebsen affirms in the Australian, this madness carries a staggering price of one trillion dollars. That’s right, a thousand billion dollars.

As this column has argued (‘Water versus massive waste’, 20 June 2026), that sum could fund a revised Bradfield Scheme to drought-proof Australia and still leave billions over. Instead, the politicians are pouring Australia’s wealth down the drain. Despite Angus Taylor warning Pauline would ‘blow up the joint’, only One Nation promises to close this folly down.

Even if the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming were as undeniable as two plus two equals four, which it clearly is not, Australia’s territorial emissions account for roughly one per cent of the world’s total. If, to paraphrase Taylor, we were to shut down the joint, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the climate.

The Labor-Greens (and until recently the Coalition) remain fixated on net zero – aided by funnelling capital into questionable paper schemes for what confidence men call ‘carbon credits’. In Australia, this can mean paying fat commissions to lock up productive farmland to let it run to ruin with weeds and scrub. All this involves the politicians take our money to pour it into, as Donald Trump puts it, ‘the greatest scam in history’.

Unlike Energy Minister Chris Bowen, Dr Christy has little need to incur a multi-million-dollar travel budget darting across the globe to climate summits. He is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. With Dr Roy Spencer, he developed the globally recognised satellite temperature dataset using microwave sounding units, earning Nasa’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.

When confronted with the assertion the climate debate is closed, Dr Christy is unequivocal. Addressing the repeated claim of a ‘consensus of thousands of scientists’ warning of ‘catastrophic system collapse’, he insists he’s one scientist – joined by many others – who simply sees ‘no empirical evidence’ for it. The climate system, he adds, is far less sensitive to carbon dioxide and related trace gases than official models assert.

Regarding the Paris Agreement and binding net zero targets, he pulls no punches: those demanding urgent, radical disruption are ‘arithmetically challenged’. Changing the climate by forcing national emission cuts is ‘just not on the cards’.

Christy examined long-term temperature records across more than 1,200 US stations. Rather than relying on homogenised averages – where algorithms purge inconvenient readings flagged as ‘anomalous’ by agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – Christy returned to raw, unadjusted daily maximum and minimum records.

What he found directly contradicts the prevailing media narrative: extreme high temperatures across the US have moderated rather than intensified over the past century.

Auditing digitised archives, Dr Christy noticed records claiming the all-time high in Newport, Oregon, was 94°F (34.4°C). Digging into original handwritten station logs, he discovered an unrecorded reading of 100°F (37.8°C) in June 1925, plus ten other days exceeding the supposed record findings confirmed by surrounding stations.

Restoring this integrity, he said, required truly laborious manual validation – work routinely bypassed today by automated algorithmic homogenisation. Without historical ground truth, one cannot understand real climatic extremes.

Australian readers will recognise the parallel. For years, observers have questioned adjustments made by the Bureau of Meteorology under its Acorn-Sat homogenisation process, which frequently saw historical hot periods revised downward thus accentuating modern warming. Following Malcolm Turnbull’s coup against Tony Abbott, ministerial interest in pursuing an independent, formal review into the Bureau’s homogenisation unsurprisingly dissipated.

Dr Christy’s paper faced significant pushback during peer review, but his persistence carried it into print. It serves as a reminder that science advances through the rigorous examination of primary data – not by enforcing some politicians’ fictional consensus.