It was a cold month in hell for global-warming alarmists.
First came word last month that the Interior Department had suspended a top scientist who helped turn polar bears into a fuzzy white symbol of the climate-change movement: Think baby seals — but much, much bigger.
Then there arose further doubts about some critical global-warming data.
First, the bears: Researcher Charles Monnett is being probed over “integrity issues” linked to his 2006 paper that argued polar bears were drowning as rising temperatures melt ice caps.
He’s no small potatoes: Al Gore used Monnett’s work to manipulative effect in his film “An Inconvenient Truth.” And the paper led directly to the 2008 classification of the bears as a “threatened” species, whose survival is allegedly at risk due to global warming.
Of course, even the data on warming are suspect, as a study published last month in the journal Remote Sensing shows.
The study looked at NASA satellite data from 2000 to 2011 and found that the atmosphere has been releasing far more heat into space than warming models predicted.
That’s key: Alarmists say carbon-dioxide emissions trap heat in the atmosphere, triggering dangerous climate changes. But satellite observations “suggest there is much more energy lost to space . . . than the climate models show,” the study found.
The warming is supposed to . . . well, snowball, as the heat itself changes cloud formations and traps even more warm air.
But that hasn’t been so, the study authors note: “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts.”
Meaning that the catastrophic scenarios pushed by warming alarmists are way off.
Of course, the point of all the huffing and puffing is to empower governments and force nations (particularly the US) to spend trillions of dollars, ostensibly to avert climatic disaster, no matter what the data show.
And for some true believers, the temptation to fudge the facts is simply too strong, as was revealed by the Climategate e-mails.
Bottom line: Forget the refrain that climate-change science is settled. There’s no need to weep for “threatened” polar bears just yet — nor, especially, for the planet.