Scientists and others on a team assembled by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which focuses on free-market solutions to today’s problems, say the “scare” of global warming from the use of carbon fuels and other human activities “is over.”

It’s “past time” for the world to realize that and “stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat,” contends Kenneth Haapala, the executive vice president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project at the Heartland Institute.

Institute experts said Thursday the Remote Sensing Systems, which provide data to NASA, NOAA and the National Science Foundation, have confirmed “the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years.”

“This extends the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change,” the organization said.

Craig Idso, senior fellow in environment for the Heartland Institute and co-editor of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, a counterpart to the IPCC, said that to “the world’s climate alarmists, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a dangerous trace gas, and for years, they have been insisting its increase will raise global temperatures and wreak havoc upon Earth’s climate and biosphere.”

“Yet, despite a 9 percent increase in CO2 over the past 18 years, there has been no rise in global temperature,” he said.

“Think about that. Over this time period the air’s CO2 content has risen some 40 parts per million, which represents fully one-third the total global CO2 increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet contrary to model projections, planetary temperatures have failed to rise,” Idso said.

Idso said it’s “time for global warming diehards to face the facts.”

“Stop denying the models have got global temperature projections wrong. Stop denying CO2 has a lower climate sensitivity than you have been claiming. Stop denying the societal benefits of continued fossil fuel use. It’s not too late to make a course correction and support sound science,” he said.

James Taylor, the institute’s senior fellow for environmental policy, said, based on the latest results in the climate studies, that the “ongoing 18 years without any warming strongly contradict alarmist predictions of global warming doom-and-gloom.”

“According to nearly all of the United Nations’ computer models, this lack of warming could not occur,” he noted. “The real-world climate proves the alarmist computer models overstate the warming properties of carbon dioxide. Even when Earth resumes its modest warming, which it likely will at some point in the next couple of decades, the pace of warming will continue to be quite modest and beneficial to human welfare and global ecosystems.”

Haapala dinged the federal EPA over the issue.

“The EPA claimed that carbon dioxide emissions are pollutants that endangers human health, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet. Green plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis to create the food plants and animals need to survive. The EPA stated that it based its finding on three lines of evidence. These lines of evidence do not exist, or no longer exist. They are: (1) a distinct human fingerprint in the atmosphere over the tropics; (2) late 20th century warming was unusual; and (3) climate models predict that human-caused warming would become dangerous to humans in the 21st century. No one, including the National Academy of Sciences, has been able to find the distinct human fingerprint except those who falsely claim such a warming is uniquely human-caused,” he said.

“Late 20th century warming stopped about 18 years ago. Climate models cannot explain why, even though, according to the White House, federal expenditures on climate science and programs to fight global warming/climate change amount to about $22.5 billion a year. There is no scientific reason to assume significant warming will occur in the future from human carbon dioxide emission.”

Haapala said it’s “past time to stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat to human health.”

Tom Harris, executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition, pointed out that the established criteria of global-warming alarmists shows their models are not reliable.

“In 2008, the NOAA ‘State of the Climate’ report specified exactly what observations would indicate whether the models are reliable or not: Fifteen years of no warming. In 2009, climate scientist Phil Jones agreed, telling a colleague in one of the leaked Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried,’” Harris said.

“Having just passed 18 years with no warming, the criteria, as set by alarmists themselves, is now satisfied. The global warming scare is over,” Harris said.

H. Sterling Burnett, research fellow at the institute and managing editor at Environment & Climate News, said this year’s high school graduates “were raised to believe in and fear something that stopped happening before they were born.”

“Growing Antarctic ice sheets, increased greening of the earth, more walruses and polar bears than at any time since the beginning of the 20th century, fewer hurricanes and tornadoes, only a modest sea level rise, longer life spans and better overall health … if these are the terrors of global warming, I’ll have more please.”

James Rust, retired professor of nuclear engineering at Georgia Tech, said there have been dozens of “explanations” for the “pause in global warming – most claiming heat is hidden somewhere in the ocean.”

“These claims are fiction, as was the claim by a British meteorologist in 2001 that children today, in 2014, would never witness snow,” he said.

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, said the evidence simply shows carbon dioxide is not the “overriding driver of the climate.”

And meteorologist John Coleman said it’s time to get over it.

“There has not been any significant man-made global warming in the past, there is none now, and there is no reason to expect any in the future,” he said. “The computer models that predicted the warming have failed to verify. There has been no warming in 18 years. The ice at the poles is stable. The polar bears are increasing. The oceans are not rising.”

Mischa Popoff, institute policy adviser, said, “Here we are in 2014 and there has been no global warming for the past 18 years.”

Alan Caruba of the National Anxiety Center said that after 18 years of observing no increase in average global temperature, it’s bad enough that the IPCC and it’s defenders won’t concede they were wrong, and the media won’t report it.

“But the worst of this 18-year anniversary of the lack of warming is the fact we have a president, a secretary of state and others in the Obama administration who continue not only to proclaim warming – now called climate change – but suggesting that it is the greatest threat to the nation and the world,” he said. “The absurdity of this should hold them up to ridicule, but these pronouncements are published without criticism.”

He said the current cooling cycle Earth is experiencing will continue for many years to come.

The cause, he said, is “nothing more mysterious than our sun – which is, itself, in a natural cycle of lower radiation.”

“As always, nature, not man, will have the last word.”

Just days ago, WND columnist Lord Monckton wrote: “Worldwide, the liarists – growing ever more desperate as the Great Pause grows ever longer – are taking up the cry that The Models Were Right All Along But The Warming Has Gone Into Hiding, Really And Truly It Has, With Knobs On, Cross My Heart And Hope To Die, So There.

“Just one problem with that. The catastrophist clique no longer entirely controls the scientific journals. It tried to, but it didn’t get away with it. In addition to ‘The ocean ate my global warming,’ the scientific journals contain a host of recent papers giving between them no less than 25 – yes, 25 – mutually incompatible explanations of the Great Pause.”

One year ago, Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw its coldest days ever, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.

The holes in the theory have been documented. For example, London’s Independent newspaper declared at the turn of the millennium “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, as saying snow would soon be “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he claimed at the time.

But the authoritative reputation of East Anglia was seriously downgraded in 2009 when leaked emails proved researchers there were engaged in a major scheme to manipulate and suppress evidence against global warming, misconduct London’s Telegraph newspaper called “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”

The rhetoric and predictions of global warming acolytes have been every bit as confusing in the United States, with former vice president and carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore telling an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” And his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.

Well-known scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth.”

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

He told WND that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.

Right now it’s cooler, he said.