Junk Science: Those trying to save the planet leave trash-filled streets in advance of a U.N. climate confab that's a solution in search of a problem. Even a former administration official thinks the Earth is fine.

Colorfully costumed zealots marched in New York and other cities Sunday in advance of Tuesday's U.N. Climate Summit. Once again they claimed, "The science is settled," and blamed capitalism for non-existent weather change.

They barely noticed, as British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton points out at Marc Morano's Climate Depot, the "Great Pause" in global temperatures now stands at 17 years and 11 months.

Monckton points out that this nearly 18-year pause in warming, which began before some of the marchers were born, is the longest since satellites began monitoring global temperatures in 1979. This pause, which has occurred even as CO2 concentrations have risen, constitutes roughly half the satellite observation period.

The problem with satellites for warm-mongers is that they cover the whole globe. They can't pick and choose where monitoring stations are put, like next to air-conditioning exhaust vents or in asphalt parking lots, or which ones they will include in their calculus.

They can't manipulate the data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, as researchers at Britain's Climate Research Unit did in what became known as Climate-gate. Satellites see the earth as dynamic but not fragile, as a place where ocean currents such as El Nino and La Nina and an infinite set of variables affect what we used to call weather in ways more profound and significant than the SUV parked in your driveway.

As we have noted many times, carbon dioxide, a significant quantity of which was exhaled by the hyperventilating marchers and speakers, is not a pollutant but the basis of all plant and therefore all animal life on earth. Robert Balling, director of Arizona State University's Office of Climatology, notes that CO2 concentrations "were much higher in the past, millions of years ago, when plants evolved around the world."

Physicist Gordon Fulks of the Cascade Policy Institute notes that the warming pause since 1997 has occurred while atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased 25%. "CO2 is responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring ... and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring," he states.

Steven Koonin, who served as undersecretary for science at the Energy Department during President Obama's first term, noted in a piece in Saturday's Wall Street Journal that "as computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influence" and that actual observations tend to refute their accuracy in predicting the future.

"The models roughly describe the shrinking extent of Arctic sea ice observed over the past two decades, but they fail to describe the comparable growth of Antarctic sea ice now at a record high," Koonin continues.

Even the Arctic is doing okay, if you consider the prediction, which Al Gore cited in his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, that the Arctic could be ice-free by the end of 2014. His prediction is off by about 920,000 square miles of ice.

Despite the fact that climate change zealots have hit a factual iceberg, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recently appointed actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who was at the march, as a U.N. Messenger of Peace. "His global stardom is the perfect match for this global challenge," said the U.N. chief.

Problem is, prophecies of climate doom are not going according to script, and celebrity is no substitute for facts that, as Ronald Reagan used to say, are stubborn things.