But what if mankind isn't responsible for the melting icecaps and the drowning polar bears? What if Al Gore and his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" greatly exaggerate the scientific facts of global warming? Mr. Gore states, with utmost certainty, that if conditions don't immediately improve, and if the United States and other nations do not agree by ratifying the Kyoto Protocol then all is lost. He predicts that ocean levels will rise 20 feet in the next century and destroy all coastline cities. But, in a 2005 joint statement by the science academies of the Western nations, including the National Academy of Sciences, estimates sea levels will rise four to 35 inches in the 21st century. Most scientists agree that even this estimate is based on a consensus of scientist not provable science. ³

School children are being shown Mr. Gore's movie in their classrooms and are returning home suffering from trauma with tear-swelled eyes after witnessing melting icebergs and drowning polar bears. They are being taught that soon polar bears will become extinct and that it's all our fault!

According to National Geographic polar bears have been spotted on sea ice hundreds of miles from shore. So children, polar bears can swim and they can swim for a long time and swim a long way. ⁴

Recently a study of animals in Canada's eastern Arctic showed that the actual numbers of polar bears was growing, not declining, as a result of mankind's interference in the environment. The study was from a survey of the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, which calculated the polar bear population has increased from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today. "There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals. His findings back the claims of Inuit hunters who have long claimed that they were seeing more bears.⁵

Getting back to consensus, best selling novelist Michael Crichton writes, "Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." ⁶