The U.N. sometimes suffers from conflicting goals. It is far too sympathetic toward "environmental" zealots, for example, as its hang ups on climate change would attest. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kan.), just back from an African fact-finding trip, says that indoor spraying of mosquitoes with DDT could save untold numbers from malaria, with no damage to the environment, were it not for environmentalist objections.

   Here's what the April 23 issue of Current Science magazine reported scientists working on the vaccine as saying: "There has never been a vaccine against an organism this complex; there has never been a successful human vaccine against a parasitic disease."

   It's horrifying enough that malaria -- a preventable and curable disease -- claims one million lives every year and that most victims are Africa's pregnant women and children under five. Compounding this tragedy, however, is the global lobbying effort against the most effective method of combating the mosquito-borne illness: spraying outdoors and inside houses with the insecticide DDT.

   The perception -- going back to Rachel Carson -- that DDT spraying is dangerous has long since been debunked. An Environmental Protection Agency hearing as long ago as 1972 concluded that "DDT is not carcinogenic, mutagenic, or teratogenic to man" and that "these uses of DDT [to fight malaria] do not have a deleterious effect on fish, birds, wildlife, or estuarine organisms."
 

    Most people would probably be surprised to learn that air quality is persistently improving throughout the land. Part of the blame for that knowledge shortfall lies with environmental advocates.
 
    But there is no denying the trend. Joel Schwartz of the conservative American Enterprise Institute says, "Air quality has improved dramatically during the last few decades, and existing requirements will eliminate most remaining air-pollution emissions during the next 20 years or so."
 
    Gregg Easterbrook of the liberal Brookings Institution writes, "It's hard to think of anything on [the] environment that Bush has rolled back." On the diesel emissions rules, he says flatly, "Bush could not have done better."

    In an interview with the Independent newspaper in Britain, Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: "No one can ignore the relentless increase in extreme weather events and so-called natural disasters , which in reality are no more natural than a plastic Christmas tree." Speaking to the same newspaper, Friends of the Earth Director Tony Juniper pressed the argument home: "Here again are yet more events in the real world that are consistent with climate change predictions."

    The Kyoto Protocol is a recipe for global poverty that would result in a temperature decline too small to measure. Global warming disciple Tom Wigley, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, conceded as much in an article last month in the journal Science.
 
    Even if we could freeze global greenhouse gas emissions at current levels, he said, global warming would still occur because of heat stored in the world's oceans. Wigley produced a graph showing that if the world followed Kyoto religiously, we'd still see an increase in global temperature of 1.94 degrees Celsius by 2100. Without Kyoto, we would get the same increase by 2094. At tremendous cost, Kyoto would postpone this increase by just six years.

   A few years ago, R.J. Braithwaite's peer-reviewed article in Progress in Physical Geography described a "mass balance analysis" he conducted of 246 glaciers sampled all around the world between 1946 and 1995. He concluded, "There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years."
 
   For example, a favorite melting glacier of the global warming activists sits atop Mt. Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania, near the equator. Satellites have been measuring temperatures near its summit for more than 25 years, finding no warming at all, yet the global warmers trot out Kilimanjaro as a poster child for their cause.
 
   The scaremongers also point (to) the Antarctic continent (without addressing) the inconvenient confounding evidence -- that the continent is actually cooling dramatically. Between 1986 and 2002, the continent cooled by 0.7 degrees Celsius per decade.

   The vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet -- a 2-mile-thick wasteland of ice larger than Australia and drier than the Sahara -- increased in mass every year between 1992 and 2003 because of additional annual snowfall, an analysis of satellite radar measurements showed.

   Despite the claims of eco-activists, the science on global warming is far from settled. Consider, for one contrary example, that three different measurements of temperature change since 1979 -- surface, satellite and weather balloon -- have provided conflicting data.

   There was (a) time, not long ago, when natural gas was the most politically popular fuel around because it burns more cleanly than oil or coal.
 
   Employment in the chemical and plastic industries has fallen by 12% since natural gas prices started rising in 2000, while at least 20 fertilizer plants have closed or gone idle. This has all had a damaging knock-on effect on farmers and manufacturers.
 
   The main political bottleneck is that the professional green lobby has turned hostile to natural gas.