The apocalypse is nigh.

It must be so. It is in all the papers.

Why even a 16-year-old Swedish scold lectured the delegates to the United Nations recently:

“You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

“For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.”

If some pulpit-pounding preacher were to repeatedly predict the end of the world, only to have the world blithely continue unabated, one would expect his congregation would shrink a bit. Not so with the climate change doomsayers.

Breitbart writer John Nolte recently put together a list of 41 environmental doomsday predictions dating from 1967 through 2014 — everything from an impending ice age to rising oceans obliterating whole nations to an ice-free Arctic to acid rain to killer bees. Of the 41, not a single one has come to pass, but the congregation keeps shouting “Amen!”

“Think about that … the so-called experts are 0-41 with their predictions, but those of us who are skeptical of ‘expert’ prediction number 42, the one that says that if we don’t immediately convert to socialism and allow Alexandria Ocasio-Crazy to control and organize our lives, the planet will become uninhabitable,” Nolte writes. “Why would any sane person listen to someone with a 0-41 record?”

This summer James Taylor, a director and writer at the Heartland Institute, cited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) own data to argue there has been no atmospheric warming in the continental United States since 2005.

According to Taylor, in 2005 NOAA began recording temperatures at 114 sites spaced across the nation that were far away from urbanization, such as growing airports that tend over time to become greater and greater heat sinks, thus skewing data. Using data from those pristine sites, Taylor says U.S. temperatures are now slightly cooler than they were 14 years ago.

“There is also good reason to believe U.S. temperatures have not warmed at all since the 1930s,” Taylor writes. “Raw temperature readings at the preexisting stations indicate temperatures are the same now as 80 years ago. All of the asserted U.S. warming since 1930 is the product of the controversial adjustments made to the raw data. Skeptics point out that as the American population has grown, so has the artificial warming signal generated by growing cities, more asphalt, more automobiles, and more machinery.”

It’s not just the U.S., Taylor says, noting that globally satellite instruments report that temperatures have risen only 0.15 degrees Celsius since 2005 — less than half the increase predicted by the oft-cited U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

As for those models, industrial chemist Mark Imisides recently penned a piece for Principia Scientific International arguing that it is thermodynamically impossible for carbon dioxide to cause global warming.

“In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much,” Imisides writes. “In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1˚C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2˚C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300˚C hotter!”

In an everyday example, he compares this to trying to heat a cold bath by putting a dozen heaters in the room and expecting the water to get warmer.

He further relates that for every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. To heat the entire ocean by just 1 degree Celsius would require heating the air above it by 4,000 degrees Celsius.

So, there is no warming and, if there were, the culprit wouldn’t be burning fossil fuels anyway. But the apocalypse is nigh and we must act yesterday.

Thomas Mitchell is a longtime Nevada newspaper columnist. You may email him at thomasmnv@yahoo.com. He also blogs at http://4thst8.wordpress.com/