Junk Science Unravels Posted 07/28/2011 07:02 PM ET Climate Change: The scientist who claimed that global warming threatens polar bears is under investigation. There's a hole in Earth's greenhouse. A cooler era lies ahead. That hiss is the hot air coming out of alarmists' balloon. The global warming fraud is coming apart faster than the alarmists can repackage and rebrand their fairy tale. Their elaborately constructed yarn can't hold together much longer. There are just too many loose ends: ⢠Charles Monnett, the scientist who predicted that polar bears would drown from a lack of sea ice, "is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity" of the article in which he makes that claim, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Monnett, a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been placed on leave pending the probe's outcome. After Monnett claimed that the deaths of four drowned polar bears foretold of an increase in deaths "in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues," polar bears became an environmentalist icon. Al Gore, for instance, resorted to emotion-evoking polar bear images in his climate change movie "An Inconvenient Truth." The New York Times Dot Earth blogger called it "a wrenching scene." So wrenching was it that the alarmist machine has continued to use the animals to frighten the public into believing the global warming hysteria. And it didn't need to do much to turn public opinion in its favor. Research done at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has found that "when just 10% of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society." The Environmental Protection Agency placed polar bears on the endangered list in 2008, four years after Monnett's observation and two years after Gore's movie filled audiences' heads with nonsense. But the claim that man-made global warming is a threat to polar bears has been debunked and the scientist who ginned up the narrative is now under scrutiny. ⢠NASA data show that between 2000 and 2011 our atmosphere didn't trap as much heat as had been previously thought. "The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who co-wrote a new paper explaining the findings, said this week. "Satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained," said Spencer. In other words, the greenhouse effect, key to the alarmists' claims that man's carbon dioxide emissions are forcing the planet temperatures to dangerous highs, is weak. ⢠Astronomers at the U.S. National Solar Observatory believe that Earth could be moving into a cooling period due to an unexpected coming break in the sunspot cycle. Research at the Air Force Research Laboratory confirms the sunspot observation. With solar activity in "hibernation," it's possible we could have another era like the Maunder Minimum. During this period, from 1645 to 1715, sunspots were uncommon and temperatures fell. Rivers that were normally free of ice froze, according to NASA, and snow remained year round at latitudes in which that isn't generally the case. Scientists aren't predicting that we're moving into a another Little Ice Age due to a replay of the Maunder Minimum. But some are warning that colder temperatures are ahead. There is research which shows that solar activity has a much stronger effect on climate than man's CO2 emissions. None of this means we've heard the last of the global warming alarmists. They won't easily abandon their campaign to manage everyone else's affairs in the name of the environment. They don't have much time left, though. Reality keeps poking big holes in their story. http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/579823/201107281902/Junk-Science-Unravels.htm