Abstract: Trillions of dollars are being spent ostensibly to avert a threatened global climate disaster. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global mean surface temperature (GMST) must not increase more than a stated amount above the pre-industrial baseline (1850–1900) to prevent irreversible catastrophe. However, the GMST does not have a precise regulatory definition, and is in fact physically meaningless based on fundamental principles of thermodynamics. Nevertheless, all IPCC climate models are tuned to reproduce historical GMST trends. This represents what Orwell presciently described: the systematic replacement of objective truth with politically convenient fiction.