OUR VIEW: The newest blow to global warming theory

The rush to impose Draconian regulations to fight global warming is based on a belief system endorsed by high priests at the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who have issued successive reports trumpeting the danger and concluding we must act immediately.

There have been increasing contrary findings, and revelations that warming zealots have rigged the data and suppressed dissenting views to advance their agenda.

In 1997 the U.S. Senate rejected 95-0 the Kyoto Protocol treaty’s drastic emission mandates. Senators objected to its economic harm for the U.S. and disproportionate benefit for countries like India. In December, 193 nations at Copenhagen’s climate summit rejected strident mandates.

In India last week, global warming theory suffered an even greater blow. The Telegraph, in the U.K., reports: “The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it ‘cannot rely’ on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by India’s own leading scientist, Dr. R.K Pachauri.”

India’s snub followed several revelations, including disclosure that the IPCC’s most “recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035,” the Telegraph reported. That claim was traced to a magazine article based on “speculation,” not peer-reviewed studies. Even so, 2035 was incorrectly copied from the date used, 2350.

The U.N. political panel summarizes thousands of scientists’ studies, prompting some to complain they were misrepresented or ignored.

New problems with IPCC reports surface almost daily. Last week, outraged Dutch said the U.N. panel, warning of of rising sea levels to the Netherlands, stated that 55 percent of the nation is below sea level. Only 20 percent is.

The global warming agenda’s scientific arguments — not just economic and political arguments — are being openly challenged, even by nations. In the U.S., legal challenges are pending to the federal government’s proposed emission caps, and likewise to California’s Global Warming Solutions Act. Legal attacks to the sufficiency of the underlying science should get a major boost from mounting revelations of slipshod research, and challenges raised by nations like India and the Netherlands. — From the Orange County Register, a Freedom Communications