Global warming? Probably. Caused by man? Maybe a fraction. There are plenty of highly esteemed scientists who are presenting alternative explanations that refute the Chicken Little message of gloom and doom and the "it’s America’s fault" group composed of such esteemed scientific experts as Al Gore, Babs Streisand, Alec Baldwin, Melissa Etheridge and other environmental crazies.

One only has to look back at an April 1975 article in Newsweek to show how much credibility some scientists should have. Thirty years ago, "expert" scientists were warning that the Earth’s end would be coming soon because of global COOLING.

There was to be drastically reduced agricultural growing seasons resulting in the destruction of "the world’s food-producing system." Huge famines and mass starvations were predicted. Political leaders were called upon to begin such measures of stockpiling massive amounts of food and to implement other drastic economic strategies so that the world could be saved! Another ice age was coming!

Oops. If these environmental crazies of the ’70s were so wrong then, why is anyone supposed to give them any credibility now? Simply because they say we should? These "experts" didn’t even explain why they were so wrong back then or apologize to those who took them seriously.

Thank heavens no action was taken then, and very little should be taken now. Once again, it is Mother Nature controlling the environment just as it has forever and will continue to do so in the future.

The only truth that was stated was buried near the end of the article. "Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data," conceded the National Academy of Sciences’ report. "Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."

You still don’t think these people are a little off? How about The Weather Channel’s climatologist, Dr. Heidi Cullen, who states that the American Meteorological Society should "strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of man-made global warming."

A CBS News "60 Minutes" reporter compared the global-warming skeptics to "Holocaust deniers." Other people have said that once we have finally woken up to the fact of global warming, and we are being hit with the results, we should have war-crime trials, some sort of "climate Nuremberg" for the skeptics.

I would laugh at these people and their off-the-wall statements, except they are actually serious. No, on second thought, I am still laughing at these people.

You can also expect the same arrogance if you ever question their findings. It is easy to tell when people have a weak leg to stand on and want to stifle any alternative notions. They stoop to insults and other demeaning behavior to intimidate you rather than answer some very real concerns and other scientific evidence that disputes their claims. Don’t worry when this happens to you. It simply means that you are standing on much more solid ground. As in most if not all cases, common sense and calmness prevail over hysteria.

I’ll probably have to continue with this column at another time. There is so much more yet to be said. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy has previously estimated that if we adhered to the terms of the Kyoto Protocol, gasoline prices would increase by 66 percent, electricity prices by 86 percent, and millions of American jobs would be lost. You could kiss our present standard of living goodbye.

But have you noticed the proposed solutions coming from these environmentalists are almost as crazy as their dire warnings? We are to walk to work (after they realized that horses made dangerous methane emissions), grow our own food, live in the dark (no candles please). I guess they want us to wear loincloths and hunt with arrows.

Rational options have already been repeatedly shot down by the fear mongers. Nuclear energy _ too dangerous, wind energy _ it causes environmental eyesores, biomass plants _ too noisy or too dirty, ethanol production _ people in Timbuktu will starve, and on and on and on. These extremists don’t want solutions; they just want to control everyone else’s behavior. Live your life the best you can. and ignore the rantings and ravings of these leftist radicals.

In the meantime, you have plenty of support behind you. The environmentalists can have Al Gore, even though he did invent the Internet. I’ll take Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, or Richard Sherwood, a Nobel Laureate for atmospheric chemistry and his work concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone. Pretty impressive credentials, and there are many more like them on your side.

If you environmentalists want to slow down carbon-dioxide emissions, find a different way to breathe.

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Tom Sears is a professor of accounting at Hartwick College in Oneonta. He can be reached at SearsT@hartwick.edu. His column appears every other week.