Whenever anyone begins an argument — especially on the topic of global warming, and particularly when it’s Paul Krugman — with “now, I’m not engaging in hyperbole,” you know you’d better fasten your seat belt because you’re in for a tour de farce.

Yesterday, Krugman claimed that “Al gore was right” because computer model projections are getting worse and worse (as observed temperatures and even IPCC projections keep getting cooler and cooler). I’ll leave it to Anthony Watts and Joe D’Aleo to recapitulate their latest explanations of the annual September Arctic-is-melting hysteria (even as it gains ice mass).

Krugman goes on thus: “For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled ‘Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America’ — yes, ‘imminent’ — and reports ‘a broad consensus among climate models.’”

Does this economist know what a “model” is? And is he unaware of the considerable and documented hurdles to maintaining your funding if your model says anything else? Good grief . . . what am I saying? Of course he doesn’t. That sort of thought isn’t permitted in the alarmist cocoon. But to discern that “imminent” is the key to the risibility of the phrase, as opposed to “model projections” is illustratively illuminating.

And Krugman closes in classic Omabaesque style, referring to the fact that he’s said something before as evidence that it is so.

The net result of this is that the environmentalist industry and its enablers and handmaidens are coming apart in the face of political (and climatic) reality faster than predicted.