WELL, IT'S NICE TO KNOW THIS, BEFORE WE SPEND TRILLIONS – AT 9:57 A.M. ET: The more we learn about global warming, the chillier the air seems.  Another revelation, this one from The Times of London:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Oh, I see.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

Why do I think there are more examples like this?

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

COMMENT:  This is absolutely and utterly disgraceful.  We have begun to realize that much of the talk of "climate change" has nothing to do with climate at all, but is a subtle assault on free enterprise.  Remember, the greatest applause at the recent so-called "climate summit" in Copenhagen went, not to President Obama, or even to Al Gore, but to the thug, Hugo Chavez, after his out-of-control assault on capitalism.

Articles like this are useful, and represent what journalism should be – a search for the truth.  We need more of them, and we need a series about the strange things that go on in the "global warming" industry.  Will it take Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal to do it?

January 18, 2010