OPINION: Don't grab life jackets yet

Sit down, because this is a shocker: Despite years of scientiflc speculation - used to demand that nations and industry redistribute their wealth - the oceans won't rise by 20-plus feet this century. Water won't rise by even six feet, says a new scientific study in the journal Science. It seems the greedy American pig in his gargantuan SUV simply can't get it done.

And who's telling us that New York, Florida, and small islands aren't going to drown? Is it the right wing of the GOP? Is it Big Oil? Neither. The answer is most shocking of all:

Scientists in Boulder, where manmade global warming has become a religion. More specifically, scientists at the University of Colorado - a research institute gushing with excitement over the globalwarming-caused-by-capitalist-pigs theory.

The Colorado Daily previewed the Science article, due for publication Friday, and reported that "global sea rise exceeding 6 feet looks to be a physical impossibility."

Not unlikely; a physical impossibility! The study was conducted by Tad Pfeffer, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Pfeffer and his colleagues studied conservative, medium and extreme assumptions about sea rise that's expected to result from the melting of Greenland, Antarctica and the rest of the world's glaciers and ice caps. They concluded that in the worst case scenario, in which nearly everything frozen melts, sea levels would rise by three to six feet by the year 2100. That's only if manmade global warming theory is 100 percent true and all innovation and human behavior fails to reduce greenhouse gases.

Still, the study concludes, the smaller sea rise could be harmful to low-lying coastal areas. And certainly that could be the case - if and when most ice melts.

Is it a looming crisis? Hardly. If global warming theory pans out, we have the century to adjust to the equivalent of an unusually high tide. We have time to stop constructing homes and businesses at the water's edge. We have time to move a few hundred yards inland - if the oceans start rising.

Pfeffer said publication of the study, which was expected Friday, might put global warming and sea rise in new context.

"There are a lot of people in the scientiflc community that think we are going to have these enormous sea level rises," Pfeffer said. "This is a bit of a reality check."

Pfeffer should have no expectation that elements of the activist scientific community will back off the alarmism, despite the reality check. Alarmist scientists have staked careers on gloom-and-doom theories that warn of societies drowning this century. Rather than respond appropriately to Pfeffer's study, professional alarmists may try to smear him. If so, they may be aided by much of the mainstream media. American capitalist pigs must be stopped, after all. They can best be stopped if they're vilified for a looming disaster in which innocent men, women and children in foreign lands get drowned in a rising sea caused by the SUV.

But have no fear. Global warming alarmism will unravel faster than popsicles melt on a Phoenix sidewalk in July.

Consider a story that appeared Aug. 29 in the Rocky Mountain News. Reporter Bill Scanlon interviewed a CU scientist who said well-publicized fears, which held that ice at the North Pole would melt to water this month, were unlikely to materialize.

"Santa can rest easy," the story said.

Walt Meier, a research scientist at CU's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told the News that this summer turned out to be cooler than last. Meier said that foiled an "office pool" at the National Snow and Ice Center for those scientists who bet the North Pole would be ice free for the first time in thousands of years.

The story contains all obligatory warnings that global warming remains a hideous threat and the ice staying at the North Pole is only the result of a temporary, seasonal temperature decline. Perhaps that's true, but we can't know for sure.

In the 1970s, after all, we were warned over and over by the "the scientific community" about manmade global cooling. Consider a few headlines from the Los Angeles Times, dredged up by the National Catholic Reporter: "Scientist Sees Chilling Signs of New Ice Age," Sept. 24, 1972; "New Ice Age Coming," Oct. 24, 1971; "Is Mankind Manufacturing a New Ice Age For Itself ?" Jan. 17, 1970; "Some Predict Ice Age Within a Few Decades," Nov. 15, 1979, and on and on.

And why the scary new ice age? Because, as scientist Irving Bengelsdorf told the Times, "in the last 30 years - precisely when man's burning activities have spewed the largest amount of carbon dioxide into the air - earth's average temperature has fallen. In 1968, ice coverage of the North Atlantic was the greatest in more than 60 years."

Two things seem abundantly clear: 1. Average global temperatures change from year to year and era to era; and 2. Water freezes and melts, freezes and melts.

Temperatures and ice are so unpredictable, so unstable, that scientists in Boulder place office bets on what might happen next.

It all inspires a theory that may be sounder than the theory of catastrophic manmade global warming. The theory: Scientists know that temperature trends, and ice formations, change over the decades and even from year to year. They use the variations to promote fear, which generates research grants and headlines. Just a theory, but as the '70s saying went: could be possible.

This much is known by respected members of the scientific community in Boulder, where global warming is sacred: Even if American capitalist pigs are warming the Earth, the North Pole won't melt this month. And, even if humans warm the Earth and everything melts, the oceans can't rise by 20 feet. Not even close. The sky isn't falling and the sea isn't rising - at least not much.