EDITORIAL: The U.N.’s climate tax

OPINION:

Alarmist hysteria that melting arctic ice is causing ocean levels to rise - threatening to flood coastal cities around the world - is a “Chicken Little” warning. Last week, scientists cut in half their estimate of the ice-loss rate. The news won’t dissuade global warmists at the United Nations to waver from their ultimate target: your wallet.

U.N. representatives met in Geneva earlier this month to discuss how to raise hundreds of billions of dollars from developed nations after last December’s confab in Copenhagen ended in dissension over funding. U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said money is the “golden key” to convincing poor nations to go green.

In Copenhagen, developed countries pledged $30 billion to pay for so-called “greenhouse-gas” reduction in 2010-2012. After that, the U.N. wants an additional $100 billion by 2020, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has a wish list calling for much more. In his upcoming report to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals summit scheduled for Sept. 20-22 in New York, Mr. Ban claims that purported global-warming mitigation in developing countries “would require financial assistance of perhaps an additional 1 percent of gross domestic product of rich countries in 2015, a small sum compared with the likely costs of inaction.” U.S. GDP in 2009 was $14.3 trillion; 1 percent of that amount would put the American payout at $143 billion. That’s hardly “a small sum.”

So it was with awkward timing that Dutch and U.S. scientists last week threw some cold water on global warming when they announced that estimates of ice loss in Greenland and West Antarctica should be reduced by half. A new study in the September issue of the journal Nature Geoscience said previous ice-melt estimates failed to account for a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment. Just as a mattress compresses and then springs back, large swaths of the Northern Hemisphere were compressed under the tremendous mass of mile-thick glaciers during the Ice Age, then began expanding as the ice receded. Global positioning satellite measurements reveal that the expansion continues today, causing some regions of the Earth’s crust to rise and pull on adjacent areas, causing them to fall.

Scientists say the crust beneath North America is still rebounding and exerting a subterranean pull on Greenland, causing it to subside. Measurements of the settling phenomenon were mistaken for rapid melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. Consequently, the 2007 prediction by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the world’s oceans would rise by between 7 and 23 inches by 2100 and inundate coastal cities is all wet.

In an August USA Today/Gallup poll, Americans ranked the environment as the least important issue facing voters this fall. This is a warning to President Obama not to cooperate with the U.N. scheme to use global warming pseudo-science for global income redistribution. Come Election Day, Americans will vote to protect their wallets.