Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared global warming a national security threat yesterday during a speech before an environmentalist group in Washington, D.C.

"The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security," Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. "Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief."

The Defense Secretary must have missed Examiner Columnist Mona Charen's recent piece on how symbols of global warming aren't working out the way environmentalists predicted.

For instance, The United Nations climate change panel "admitted that the melting Himalayas prediction was not based on science but on a 1999 media interview given by one scientist," Charen observed.  "They said they regretted the error. Now, a study in nature, based on satellite imagery, has shown that some melting of lower altitude glaciers is taking place but that higher glaciers have been adding ice."

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With reference to the story of an apparently-marooned polar bear floating on an ice floe -- puzzling, as polar bears can swim for hundreds of miles -- Charen cited a new Canadian study showing that the polar bear population is on the rise.

"Oh, and the scientist for the Department of the Interior whose 2004 work on drowning polar bears inspired Al Gore and others has been placed on administrative leave for unspecified wrongdoing," she added.