For decades the communist left in America has tried to scare us all into accepting an authoritarian lifestyle, the kind which our founders rebelled against.

During the countercultural ‘revolution’ of the 1960s, the big scare — the big lie, the hoax — was that our planet was going to die from overconsumption and “overpopulation,” so we should stop having children to ‘preserve’ our world.

Next up, it was global “cooling.” As average temperatures fell over a period of a decade or so and weather patterns changed somewhat, the unscientific left predicted a coming second “Ice Age” would snuff out all life, so we would need to make major alterations in our lifestyles in order to prevent that catastrophe.

But when temperatures began to warm again, and in some instances, unseasonably so, global cooling was changed to “global warming” but with the same dire predictions that modern life was ruining the planet and we would have to give up raising meat, fossil fuels and modernity so we could live.

When ‘global warming’ didn’t scare enough people into compliance, they altered the verbiage again to “climate change” — because after all, our climate has always ‘changed,’ hasn’t it? Only, it changed because the earth is a living planet with a changing ecosystem, not because of cattle methane and SUVs.

Flawed research underpinning the current arguments about ‘climate change’

Now we learn that all of the statistical models used to predict our demise were nothing but junk science, too, as The Epoch Times is revealing:

A new study in “Climate Dynamics” has criticized a key methodology that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses to attribute climate change to greenhouse gases, raising questions about the validity of research that relied on it and prompting a response from one of the scientists who developed the technique.

The new study’s author, economist Ross McKitrick, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview that he thinks his results have weakened the IPCC’s case that greenhouse gases cause climate change.

The methodology, known as “optimal fingerprinting,” has been used to link greenhouse gases to everything from temperature to forest fires, precipitation, and snow cover.

The researcher went on to compare optimal fingerprinting to the way police officers use the technique to identify criminals.

“[They] take this big smudge of data and say, ‘Yeah, the fingerprints of greenhouse gas are on it,’” he told the outlet.

The researcher said that the authors of that decades-old paper, Myles Allen and Simon Tett, made several mistakes in the way they validated their strategy.

“When you do a statistical analysis, it’s not enough just to crunch some numbers and publish the result and say, ‘This is what the data tell us.’ You then have to apply some tests to your modeling technique to see if it’s valid for the kind of data you’re using,” he said.

“They claimed that their model passes all the relevant tests—but there are a couple of problems with that claim. The first is they stated the conditions wrong—they left most of the relevant conditions out that you’re supposed to test—and then they proposed a methodology for testing that is completely uninformative. It’s not actually connected to any standard testing method,” he added.

And again, this is the paper the climate change whackjobs have often cited as their Bible of sorts, meaning that all policies related to its ‘findings’ are based on false premises, false data, and false conclusions.

“You’re dependent on climate model data to construct the test—and the climate model already embeds the assumptions about the role of greenhouse gases,” said McKitrick. “You can’t relax that assumption.”

Allen refuted McKitrick in an email to The Epoch Times, blowing off the criticism as if it is irrelevant because climate science as ‘moved on.’

But McKitrick didn’t buy that and pushed back.

“Even if it were true that [Allen’s method] is no longer used and people have moved on to other methods, [given] its historical prominence, it would still be necessary as a scientific matter for Simon and Myles either to concede their paper contains errors or rebut the specific criticisms,” he wrote in an email to the outlet.

“And the reality is the climate profession hasn’t moved on. The IPCC still discusses the Optimal Fingerprinting method in the AR6 and relies on many papers that use it.”

We’ve all been duped again by these left-wing counterrevolutionary authoritarians who, for some reason, can’t stand the fact that humans like to live free and prosper.