THE SILLIEST SEASON: JUST CALL IT SUMMER.

Byline: TAD CRONN Local View

SURE sign that it's silly season: The normally sensible Tony Blair and the normally reasonable Governator are teaming up to defeat global warming.

OK, I know it's been hot lately, but that doesn't mean the globe is in any danger of burning to a cinder. And the notion of Blair and Arnold Schwarzenegger grappling the global-warming dragon into submission by charging for carbon is just absurd.

Anybody else remember when the hot part of the year was just called summer? And sometimes summer was cooler than ``normal'' and sometimes it was hotter than ``normal.''

Until very recently, there was none of this running the home air conditioner 24 hours a day until all the neighborhood transformers blew out. But nowadays, people expect a constant 75 degrees in their homes, and when they don't get it, it's global warming.

There are three major contentions of global-warming theory, each of which is dubious: One, the globe's average temperature is rising; two, the temperature increase is because of human activity; and three, any global temperature increase will be a major disaster.

First problem is that until very recently, we have not had satellites that could even reasonably attempt to take a ``global temperature,'' and it's debatable whether current approaches are accurate. To get a truly accurate picture, you would have to be able to capture temperatures over the entire globe's surface, and at all altitudes in the atmosphere simultaneously or at least within a small time frame. Then, you would have to be able to do that over an extended period -- preferably years. Then you could possibly establish a trend.

Current techniques rely on samplings taken from select areas at particular times. Yet for all the anecdotal evidence that this or that glacier is shrinking, there are other glaciers that are growing. For every study showing Greenland is greening, there's a study showing polar temperatures have decreased in recent years. Even if we could establish a global average, we don't have that information for past years, so we don't have a basis other than anecdotal evidence for saying temperatures were lower in previous years.

There is also no evidence that human activity can affect the global climate. Scientists tell us that the Earth has warmed and cooled in past centuries even before the Industrial Revolution, so blaming SUVs is just politicking by people who can't stand the thought of successful car manufacturers.

But what if global warming is true? What if the ice caps melt? You may have seen graphics showing that the entire world map would look like the Hawaiian islands, but the reality is if all the ice caps and glaciers melted, it would add up to a rise in ocean level of at most a couple of feet.

So when the Governator and Tony Blair, or any other cabal of politicians, start making plans to regulate greenhouse gases, what does it really mean? That they're currying votes. Arnold is eager to wave his environmental credentials in the race against Phil Angelides, as is obvious from recent campaign commercials.

It is to be hoped that this plan of Arnold's is only an empty campaign promise. Any real attempt to regulate greenhouse gases would only raise the price of gasoline further and drag down the state's economy. Efforts to stop global warming always seem designed to do more damage than global warming ever could.