You can’t make this stuff up. Hillary’s revelation that during her tenure as Secretary of State she ran the department as though it were an appendage of the Clinton Foundation; Republicans doing their best impression of a Common Core civics lesson to instruct the Iranian leader, when their letter should have been addressed to America’s leader; Democrats, at least many of their multicultural, morally relativistic, blame-America-first acolytes of Jeremiah Wright’s “G. D. America” diatribe, accusing Republicans of treason; and current Secretary of State, John Kerry, trying to get a deal with the Iranians to change their nuclear program timetable from apocalypse now to apocalypse later; the list goes on. The real question is, which among these events should be considered the single most important crisis facing this generation of decision makers?

The answer is, none of the above. In fact, the correct answer is not found on this list, but rather in a speech made by Secretary Kerry to the Atlantic Council on March 12, in between executive denunciations of the leader of our most important ally in the region and negotiations with the world’s most nefarious supporter of terrorism. It’s climate change; specifically, the 97-percent-of-scientists-agree variety of climate change. Indeed, in his words, if we (the world, but mostly the American government) do nothing, “future generations will judge our effort, not just as a policy failure, but as a collective, moral failure of historic consequence. And they will want to know how world leaders could possibly have been so blind, or so ignorant, or so ideological, or so dysfunctional, and, frankly, so stubborn that we failed to act on knowledge that was confirmed by so many studies over such a long period of time and documented by so much evidence.”

Whew! Where to start? In fact, Kerry is part of a lavishly government funded menagerie of what Paul Driessen refers to as the Climatist Jihadis, a fanatical sect, many of whose members are perhaps best characterized by the words President Reagan once used to describe the Soviet Union: “The only morality they recognize is what will further their cause, meaning they reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain [their goals].” The crimes so far have not extended beyond a New York Times cartoon instructing readers to stab climate change deniers to death, but there has been enough lying and cheating by the Jihadis to fill a new Black Book of Communism for the Green movement.

Consider, for instance, the 97-percent-of-scientists-agree fiction, applied in this case to the global warming flavor of climate change. Jeff Dunetz addressed this point in an excellent essay that appeared in Hot Air last year, and is best summarized by his comment that “you are more likely to see the tooth fairy or a unicorn than a 97% consensus of scientists believing that there is man made global warming.” Of course, that does depend on the scientists you consult. As Rachelle Peterson pointed out in The Federalist recently, “Paper trails indicate that the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies solicited climate science research that supported their conclusions, cherry-picked peer reviewers known to be sympathetic to the pro-global warming cause, and overlooked conflicts of interest by assigning research papers to be reviewed by members of the same organizations that produced the research in the first place.” In other words, the fix is in; if you want lots of federal money, along with insulation from any questions about your research, be sure to toe the party line and tell the ideologues in the government and elsewhere exactly want they want to hear.

Naturally, most of us are not in a position to evaluate the results of the multitude of “scientific studies” that purport to argue the case one way or the other; likely for non-specialists much of the research has an eye-glazing quality to it. However, it’s not the science so much as it is the ideology of the global-warming, climate change elite that is so very disturbing. Indeed, for a student of politics, the gravest concern is that the world has witnessed this sort of madness in the past, and on an impressive scale. In fact, no other current political phenomenon exemplifies Hannah Arendt’s characterization of totalitarianism better than climate change ideology in all its variants, in that it reflects a “fanatical commitment to a fictitious world” propped up by a huge complex of domestic and international bureaucracy ostensibly committed, in this case, to saving the world from itself.   And as we have seen, mostly based on government mandated and financed “scientific studies.”

Although this may seem like a rant, let us take two extreme cases, one of them involving what was without question one of the most advanced nations in the world, and another that was based on—guess what—“scientific” socialism. Thus, the Nazis convinced themselves and their captive populations about something they called an “international Jewish conspiracy,” while the Bolsheviks built their empire on the basis of opposition to a global capitalist plot. Both regimes constructed enormous police states based on a foundation of what each insisted was scientific evidence. The terrifying consequence of such efforts is that they forced ordinary citizens to conclude that such efforts actually existed for the purposes their leaders proclaimed, which was to ferret out what must have been unspeakably dangerous threats to their lives—like global warming or climate change ideology today.

It was all a massive fraud, of course; the global Jewish conspiracy existed only in the minds of Hitler and his demented entourage, while dissenters were dismissed as advocates of “Jewish science,” whereupon many left the country before being rounded up for the death camps. In the Soviet case, dissension was handled by confinement to a gulag or a psychiatric hospital. In both cases, politicized science backed by an ideological elite led to these countries’ ruin.

Now obviously Climatist Jihadis prefer silencing their adversaries in less brutal ways, but concern over their fanaticism remains warranted. As well as the arrogance of the true believers, who have been sending out emails for a “climate change fantasy tournament,” asking readers’ reactions to prominent “deniers’” comments. Oh, there’s a fantasy going on out there, of course. It’s called the ideology of man-made climate change. The rest of us simply call it the weather.