“Man-caused global warming is the biggest scam perpetrated against society since time began,” says Jay Lehr, science director for the Heartland Institute. “The whole concept behind climate change is fear and control.”

When you explore the facts, ice core samples for the last 900,000 years, and records from the last 5,000 years, Lehr explains the global climate has meandered through fairly predictable 1,500-year cycles of warming and cooling.

“The whole scam is based on mathematical models,” Lehr explains. He adds none of those models anticipated nor accounted for the global cooling in 2007 that basically erased the 100 years of global warming preceding it.

Lehr has studied global climate change for more than three decades. He’s an internationally renowned speaker, scientist and author who has testified before Congress on more than three dozen occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the federal government and with many foreign countries. More than that, he sounds downright normal.

Lehr was a featured speaker at the recent annual convention of the Texas and Southwest Cattle Raiser’s Association.

You’ve heard plenty about the much-publicized revelation of e-mails in November that called into serious question the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and scientists behind the organization.

According to an article by H. Sterling Burnett for the Heartland Institute, the e-mails, “…revealed longstanding efforts to manipulate, hide and destroy scientific data that cast doubt on global warming alarmism. The late-November document leak also exposed pernicious tactics used to strong-arm the peer-review publishing process in order to keep skeptical scientists from publishing their findings.”

Of course, that didn’t stop the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from trumping Congress in December and declaring an endangerment finding for greenhouse gases (GHGs). Of its own volition, EPA essentially declared that GHGs threaten the public health and welfare of the American people and should be regulated via the Clean Air Act.

Keep in mind that EPA’s ruling came out a week after Climategate broke. Unsurprisingly, a number of states are suing EPA over the designation, and some federal law makers are working to get EPA to rescind its judgment.

How these supposed experts square their notions with reality is anyone’s guess. Reality like the fact that of the small number of glaciers man has studied, a third are shrinking, but a third are growing while another third remain unchanged. Reality like the fact that the polar bear population in North America – often used as the evocative poster child of manmade global warming destruction – has grown from 5,000 head in 1960 to 25,000 head today. According to Lehr, there are 22 clans of polar bears on the continent; 14 are growing and six remain stable. The two clans declining in population are those located in the coldest part of the continent.

“Temperature fluctuations during the current 300-year recovery from the Little Ice Age correlate almost perfectly with fluctuations in solar activity,” Lehr explains. “This correlation long predates human use of significant amounts of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas."

In fact, Lehr says increased GHGs are responsible for about 2 million tons of additional vegetation on the equator. “The increased growth in the rain forest along the equator has far outweighed whatever amount of vegetation was cut down by peasants in order to scratch some food out of the land,” Lehr explains. “There was a loss of rain forests and now there's a very significant advancement of green energy in rain forest.”

Spun another way, Lehr stresses carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane are not pollutants; they are absorbed by the atmosphere. Rather than increased CO2 increasing global temperatures, Lehr explains ice cores verify that historical increases in global temperature precede increasing levels of GHGs; more of them are released by the oceans as they warm.

Even the common measures of GHG emissions pinned to ag production are wrong, says Frank Mitloehner, University of California-Davis associate professor and air quality specialist (see “Modern Agriculture is the Solution” elsewhere in this newsletter).

The reason folks hear few of these facts, Lehr says, is that the media prefers to focus on alarmist rhetoric, cash-strapped scientific researchers are cowed into looking at global warming in order to get funding, there are piles of money to be made from trading carbon credits, and there’s lots of power to be wielded if you control people’s carbon footprints.

By the way, you likely remember hearing about the 2007 Oscar-winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” It supported a book by the same name authored by Al Gore. The movie documented the Power Point presentation of the book’s message that Gore has presented around the world. Lehr says there’s a scene in the movie depicting a forlorn polar bear swimming and swimming, looking for a glacier until finally, apparently exhausted, the bear begins going under, presumably for the last time.

It’s a fake, says Lehr – just computer animation, as are other scenes used in the movie. “Pity not the polar bear,” Lehr says, “They can swim 60 miles.”