In the 1960s, estimates put the polar bear population at just 5,000 worldwide. In 40 years, the polar bear population across the world has grown 500 percent to around 25,000.

Though the polar bear has become the poster child (or poster animal) for Global Warming, the fact is that a reduction in hunting has allowed the polar bear to flourish, and there is absolutely no evidence to support the wild-eyed claims of Al Gore and other Anthropologic Global Warming fanatics that the polar bear will disappear from Earth by 2050. In fact, in parts of the world where polar bears reside and the climate has warmed (or, at least, we’re told it has), polar bears are flourishing.

Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol analyzed carbon dioxide levels going back to 1850 and found that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased in the past 150 years.

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a warning a couple of years ago that glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains were melting at such a rate that by 2035 there would be no glaciers left in the Himalayans. This week, the IPCC was forced to apologize because, it turns out, this claim was completely fabricated.

One of the scientists involved in the IPCC’s report that referenced the (not so) disappearing glaciers of the Himalayan Mountains even admitted that the information was included in the IPCC report to put political pressure on world leaders.

The Anthropologic (man-made) Global Warming scare is unraveling.

In November we learned that scientists in England had been employing “Mike’s nature trick” to skew results and plotting to destroy data rather than turn it over to freedom of information requests. A few weeks later, these same scientists had to admit the original data on which their research was based had in fact been lost – but not deliberately, they said.

The predictions of warming aren’t holding true. The idea that the carbon dioxide produced by humans is warming the planet and will create a climatological disaster in the future is predicated entirely on the assumption that the oceans and plant life across the globe are or will be unable to absorb the carbon dioxide humans produce.

But there is no evidence to support this assumption. The models used to predict climate change incorporate this assumption, but the assumption is a guess and nothing more. It is not based on scientific inquiry. It is not based on evidence.

Clear thinking humans with the most basic understanding of the history of our planet are able to deduce without the benefit of Ph.Ds that the Earth has warmed and the Earth has cooled multiple times irrespective of human activity and any warming or cooling that we may or may not be experiencing is entirely consistent with these larger cycles.

These changes to our planet and to our climate happened without the benefit of SUVs and coal burning power plants, and they happened over and over again. I expect, too, that with or without SUVs, these changes will continue to occur in the future.

The damage these scientists have done to the faith and confidence placed in “science” is incalculable. This junk science has been pushed throughout society, force-fed to the public by a hysteric media, taught in our schools by well-meaning but very misled teachers, and now a generation of kids are learning that people who are supposed to be rigorous in their pursuit of truth are willing on a global scale to lie and cheat and ignore the scientific method in order to secure for themselves more and bigger grants.

And as best I can tell, that’s what it all comes down to: money.

Millions of dollars over the last two decades have gone into the research of anthropologic global warming. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on deliberately faulty research.

The time and money – in direct grants to these scientists and in government regulations that have cost business and industry and consumers – is also incalculable. A great, global scam has been perpetrated on the world by lying scientists and their enabling politicians (or is it lying politicians and enabling scientists?).

Governments around the world have used the threat of global warming to secure more power. Governments have used the threat of global warming to force individuals to change their behavior. Governments have used the threat of global warming to seize more money. Politicians have used the threat of global warming to vacation in Copenhagen and New York and countless other sweet spots around the world.

Compared to the anthropologic global warming myth, Bernie Madoff looks like a pickpocket.

Yet even as the extent of the lie is exposed (and I am confident there will be more to come), politicians and the scientists who have depended on Anthropologic Global Warming as their bread and butter continue to repeat the lie. No effort is being made to turn back draconian regulations that cost business and consumers countless dollars in unnecessary costs.

We should be grateful that the United States has been slow or at times even resistant to the threat promised by this faked science. President George W. Bush was repeatedly vilified by the hysteric media for his refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty, but we should all write him a letter of thanks today.

And we should also write our congressman and senators and demand that they now start to turn back the regulations put in place by our federal government and the bureaucrats at the EPA (who, you’ll remember, threatened to set their own standards for carbon emissions because they were unwilling to wait for Congress to do it). We should demand that the cap-and-trade legislation never come to the floor of the Senate for a vote. We should demand that no more tax dollars go to these scientists or those who have already reaped too much benefit from their lies.

The money that has gone into the Anthropologic Global Warming scam has already cost the taxpayers too much.

No wonder Al Gore in 2007 told Congress that “the science is settled” on global warming: He knew the science couldn’t bear the weight of scrutiny.

Rob Peecher is editor of The Oconee Leader.

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