Waves of lies.

ITEM: A January 13 Reuters news service story reported: "Damage done by Asia's tsunami gives a clearer idea of the danger climate change poses to small islands, which fear rising seas will submerge them as the world warms, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said [today]." Reuters quoted Annan as saying: "It is no longer so hard to imagine what might happen from the rising sea levels that the world's top scientists are telling us will accompany global warming."

ITEM: The Voice of America News on January 3 cited a "global warming expert" who indicated that the tsunami revealed a vulnerability to rising sea levels caused by global warming: "A professor at the University of California says the tsunami that struck Asia and Africa highlights how many people live along the world's coastlines. What's more, she says, it highlights the need to take action on global warming, which could affect sea levels."

VOA interviewed Naomi Oreskes, an associate professor of history and director of the program in science studies at the University of California. "Many reports have been issued stating Global Warming is a reality, but often a government official says more study is needed," VOA stated. Oreskes added: "Many people have gotten the impression that we really do need more study--that it really is a kind of contested scientific issue. And that's just not true. The science of this problem is not at issue."

CORRECTION: There is a growing, unsettling predisposition among environmental extremists with polemical axes to grind to blame mankind in general and industrial development in particular for natural disasters. This penchant, so frequently displayed by global-warming alarmists, reached new depths in the wake of the South Asian disaster. Professor Oreskes, cited above, is representative of many who tried to link the tsunami to man-made climatic changes.

She also made the same absurd argument that there is a scientific consensus about global warming in Science magazine in December--in an essay that purportedly analyzed 928 abstracts from scientific journals during the last decade containing the keywords "climate change." Not even one, she said, determined that climate change was occurring naturally. Case closed--or so she claimed. Many experts rightly ridiculed this unwarranted assertion. For example, Benny Peiser from Liverpool John Moores University (U.K.) queried: "Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?"

Continued Peiser: "Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science] review. That's how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!"

Chris Hornet, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told CNSNews.com: "Publishing such an easily debunked falsehood in an erstwhile reputable, peer-review publication demonstrates either a new low in desperation or a new generation believing there are no checks and therefore no limits."

The exploitation of this Asian disaster would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. As the Wall Street Journal observed: "Geologists say that groups of giant earthquakes hit Sumatra every 230 years or so. The last quakes there were in 1797 and 1833--and surely not even Greenpeace would blame those on greenhouse gases--and so Sunday's latest quake was more or less on schedule."

Dr. Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, recently authored Meltdown, detailing many of the distortions about global warming. In a news release, he commented: "Anyone who has the moral audacity to blame thousands of deaths caused by the Indian Ocean tsunamis on global warming is in grave contravention of well-known facts about changes in sea level in that region." As he recalled: "Topex-Poseidon satellite data published in 2001 in Science magazine by Cabanes et al. show that the region where the tsunamis were most devastating has, in general, experienced a recent decline in sea level."