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 ….