Talk-show science.

Amazing, even thrilling, how the truth invariably outs. Readers should be comforted by the fact that good science is logically and invariably based in truth and the sound observation of natural law.

In mid-March came the news that the trials of an experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease--strongly promoted by Hollywood celebrities Mary Tyler Moore and Michael J. Fox--have ended in failure. As it turns out, the treatment, in which cells from aborted foetuses were transplanted into the brain, has produced nasty and irreversible side-effects.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, American scientists have found that the therapy had a worse effect than the disease itself in about 15 percent of the patients who received it. The study found that while those patients appeared to make good progress at first, they soon began to suffer jerky, involuntary movements of their head and arms. Moreover, the side-effects were "absolutely devastating for five patients in the trial who can no longer control their movements."

The treatment should therefore be stopped, concluded Dr. Paul Greene of Columbia University in New York.

All of which sadly and painfully affirms the Church's teaching on the use of cells from aborted foetuses as intrinsically wrong. Nor should it surprise anyone that such therapies don't work.

Two weeks later, much to the chagrin of environmentalists around the globe, American president George W. Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol (agreed by 180 countries over a decade of tough negotiations). Compliance with the protocol meant that the United States would have to implement legislation to cut emissions of carbon dioxide--said to be the cause of global warming--from power stations, said to be one of the principal sources of C02.

With that single decision, Bush showed himself to be an opponent of talk-show science.

"Mark yesterday's date," moaned environmental journalist Geoffrey Lean in typically overstated fashion. "Remember where you were when you first heard that President George W. Bush was killing off the world's attempt to tackle global warming...and threatening to doom the last chance to bring the accelerating climate change under control."

As a consequence, the earth will soon become "uninhabitable," he warned. Perhaps...but not for the reasons he thinks.

Like Darwinian theories of evolution, like Sigmund Freud's and Alfred Kinsey's theories of human sexuality, like Margaret Meade's theories of free-love among the Trobrianders, like Paul Erlich's Zero Population Growth, the theory of global warming has yet to be proven.

Indeed, so thin is the 'evidence' that it doesn't rightly qualify even as a theory. Rather, it remains a hypothesis.

Oh sure, we've all heard the stories about hotter summers and never-before-witnessed melting polar caps and so on, chanted mantra-like by modern-day prophets of doom. Except that, if you're paying close attention to temperature charts, you will have noticed that such fluctuations have all happened before and, more importantly, there's no actual proof that 'global warming' truly exists in the first place.

All of which is reminiscent of Paul Erlich's warnings in the 1960s that unless humans stopped reproducing, by the year 2000, we'd all be standing cheek by jowl on every continent, our faces pointed upward gasping for air. I ask you... Yet man's capacity for entertaining lunatic notions and then turning them into policy seems boundless.

Since Ehrlich's apocalyptic predictions, China has continued to enforce its one-child-only policy, women continue to gulp birth control pills with their morning orange juice and abort unwanted pregnancies in record numbers. And in some countries such as Russia, the population is dropping alarmingly. No surprise either that the world view of human beings and life in general has shifted from "gift" to "problem".

At the same time, Darwinian hypotheses are now taken as gospel by a majority of the world populaton despite the fact they have never been proven incontrovertibly or that the evidence against them far outweighs the 'proofs'.

As for anthropologist Margaret Mead's quaint notions that a primitive society untainted by Christian teachings naturally produces a paradise of guiltless and unjealous free love have been discredited, and her supporting documentation revealed to be an utter fraud. Yet few people seem to know this.

God bless good scientists who persist in their pursuit of truth and hard facts. And God bless George Bush for not succumbing to the bullying tactics of ignorant talk-show hosts interested only in boosting rating by frightening mobs of viewers into believing nonsense.

Global warming, indeed. The real issue is sin. And until we begin to address that problem, global warming will never be more than just another example of man's penchant for wasting time and energy on endless distractions.

Paula Adamick is our London, England columnist. Her column appears every other issue.