Every day it seems new evidence emerges that the “evidence” for global warming has been exaggerated, manufactured or just plain wrong.

Take the case of Charles Monnett of the US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. On July 18, Monnett — a longtime poster boy for global-warming orthodoxy — was put on leave pending an investigation into the “integrity” of his work.

The specifics of the investigation are as yet unclear, but the Associated Press reports on indications that the questioning “has centered on observations that Monnett and fellow researcher Jeffrey Gleason made in 2004 . . . of four dead polar bears floating in the water after a storm. They detailed their observations in an article published two years later in the journal Polar Biology.”

Monnett and Gleason claimed this was the first known observation of polar bears apparently drowning after being forced to swim long distances in the open sea. Naturally, they saw global warming — which allegedly is shrinking the polar ice caps — as the culprit. The dead bears, they wrote, “suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.”

Thanks in large measure to the work of Monnett and Gleason, the polar bear became the official mascot for climate-change alarmism. Images of a lone polar bear perched forlornly on a shrinking ice flow served as efficient propaganda for indoctrinating children; Al Gore used the “polar bears are drowning” meme in his global warming scare-umentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

And in 2008 the US government officially listed the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

Now Monnett has been put on “leave” due to “integrity” issues. Great.

It’s easy for greens to dismiss the discrediting of any one researcher. Much more devastating is the recent blow to the computer models whose predictions underlie a wide swath of the so-called “science” of global warming.

The blow comes from a new paper, published in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing, by Drs. Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell. The two scientists compared the predictions about what the atmosphere “should” do to what satellite data showed the atmosphere actually did do during the 18 months before and after warming events since 2000.

They found — shock! — that the computer models vastly overestimated the greenhouse effect. Turns out that the Earth is far more capable of equalizing its own temperature than environmentalists would have us believe.

Spencer, a research scientist for the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, explains “The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show . . . There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

A huge discrepancy between the “data” and “forecasts.” In other words, a huge discrepancy between global-warming theory and actual, observable reality.

Matt Patterson is senior editor at the Capital Research Center.

