Scientific inquiry is challenging. One must make observations, then create a hypothesis to explain these observations. Once the hypothesis predicts future observations, conclusions are reached about cause and effect of the aforementioned observations. This is called the scientific method.

It’s far easier to play this out in reverse. Decide upon the desired conclusion and work backwards, concocting a hypothesis that somehow manages to use contradictory observations to bolster the foregone conclusion. This is the type of pretzel logic that global warming scientists use to convince us to, “believe us, not your thermometer.”

How else could this sentence lead a recent article on global warming? “Scientists now believe that global warming is to blame for extreme cold snaps in North America during the winter months.” I suppose by this logic excessive rainfall causes droughts.

These “scientists” have already reached their conclusion that global warming is real and progressing, despite the inconvenient truth that global temperatures have not risen over the past 15 years, even with increasing carbon dioxide emissions. “Who pressed the pause button?” on global warming, asks The Economist.

Contradictory evidence be damned, a team of Korean and American scientists are invoking the hypothesis of a “polar vortex” to contort the reality of increasing polar ice and cooling temperatures into support for their preordained conclusion of increasing global warming. The reality is that the increasing ice is, “Confounding climate change computer models which say it should be in decline.“

The scientific method dictates that when the models aren’t working, it’s time to rework the models and assumptions, not double down by invoking unicorns and leprechauns to explain why up is really down. Instead, if we follow the logic of the scientists that ‘cooling is really warning’ to its conclusion, then the next ice age will be the definitive conclusion of decades of global warming.

Just imagine if the uncooperative polar ice was melting rather than thickening. We would hear a collective chorus of, “See See See” from the climate activists and the media that the planet really is warming. That Al Gore was right when he predicted that the North Pole would have melted by 2013.

How much easier it would have been for climate scientists if reality did  support their assertions and predictions. Instead the scientists engage in contortions worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance in order to cling to their preordained conclusions about the world’s climate. A honest scientist would question their original hypotheses and predictions, admitting that the planet is not warming and that there is still much we don’t understand about climate.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician, is an advocate of smaller, more efficient government. Twitter @retinaldoctor.