Regarding all this hoo ha over "global warming" that we're hearing this week, there's just one question: Why should we believe all these dire predictions when they can't even get the five-day forecast right?

Instead, all that we've seen is about a billion news stories about how global warming is happening without a contrary opinion, then hundreds of stories about the "debate" being over. Those with a different theory or opinion are now called "deniers" and are shunned and vilified.

This latest doom and gloom report comes from the United Nations, the fine folks who have ignored the butchery in Rwanda and Darfur, not to mention gave us the corruption of Oil for Food. Now we get science by committee and fiat.

The earth is a four billion year old, ever changing system and we humans have only been burning the dreaded fossil fuels for the past 100 orbits. Yet, we are suppose to believe that we are the cause of all these future science fiction scenarios of melting ice caps, searing heat waves, stronger, deadlier hurricanes and unemployment checks for Punxsutawney Phil.

Hollywood has been getting into act too, with movies like "The Day After Tomorrow," featuring biblical weather disasters that even climate experts pushing the "global warming" theories scoffed at. Now we have Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," the greatest fear mongering film made about the environment since the 1971 epic "Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster."

The experts keep telling us that "the temperature increase this century could be the greatest in thousands of years," yet they don't mention what caused this hike in the heat all that time ago.

According to a government paper on the Ice Age, forests quickly regained the ground they had lost to the cold about 11,500 years ago and the ice sheets began melting. "The Earth entered several thousand years of conditions warmer and moister than today," the report said. "... the Saharan and Arabian deserts almost completely disappeared under a vegetation cover, and in the northern latitudes forests grew slightly closer to the poles than they do at present. This phase, known as the 'Holocene optimum' occurred between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago."

So what caused this last phase of "global warming?" King Tut's SUV?

There's also a certain format that "scientific" articles which appear in the mainstream press follow. It goes something like this: First, the report is written in such a way to inflame, frighten or enthuse the reader. Secondly, the scientists state that "we are not totally certain yet." This is immediately followed with "but with more funding, we can ..."

These scare reports also have a weird side effect of creating all these eco-terrorists that think they are saving the earth by burning down housing developments, torching car dealerships and refusing to take a bath. Once such recent case is a 62-year-old man in Lubbock, Texas, who was so concerned about the environment, he stretched wires between trees at neck level and put nails and glass in the pathway of bicyclists.

His reasoning? He loved nature and "he was trying to protect area wildlife."

Another two of these eco-terrorists were convicted in December of burning down buildings on Vail Mountain in 1998, among other acts of arson around the northwest. Apparently, they were protesting the environmental impact that a resort had on the local cougar habitat.

This writer just doesn't understand how one preserves an animal's habitat by burning down the forests it lives in.

It's fitting that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their report on Groundhog Day, since the scientific basis they use to predict the weather are so similar. The U.N's own website states that the actual report will be retained for another three months to facilitate editing -- to suit their summary.

"Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter."

Science is about facts and being able to replicate results, not about arriving at a consensus. In this case, "global warming" has been held as a preordained fact and then the data was collected to prove it. "Science" has now degenerated to the point that research must now conform to pre-released summaries.

There has never been any "debate" about global warming.

Instead, it has been decreed.