he Earth has grown warmer. That can be substantiated with thermometer readings.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and most state legislators believe that man-made CO2 and other gases are altering our climate. So they have embarked on an expensive and intrusive regulatory campaign to suppress greenhouse gases. As a consequence, thousands of Californians will pay more for their electricity, thousands of others will lose their jobs and most of us will suffer a declining quality of life.

What if Schwarzenegger and his ideological kindred are wrong?

We hope they were paying attention to the findings of Lord Christopher Monckton, former scientific advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. This month, he published a peer-reviewed paper, “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered.” The paper concludes that, (1) “…the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic ‘greenhouse gas’ warming is entirely absent from the observed record”; (2) even if the world is warming, “the overwhelming majority of the scientific peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue”; (3) “Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate”; (4) “Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good”; and (5) “Even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation [to the new climate, if necessary] would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.”

Monckton posits that global warming has actually occurred because the sun has been more active than at any time in the past 11,400 years. He notes that Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon and Pluto have been warming along with the Earth.

If higher world temperatures are not human-produced, then Gov. Schwarzenegger’s attempt, as he puts it, “to make California No. 1 in the fight against global warming,” is a costly fraud. In 2006, he sponsored and signed into law AB 32, requiring the California Air Resources Board to develop regulations to reduce California’s greenhouse emissions by 25 percent by 2020, with mandatory caps on “significant sources” of emissions by 2012. The costs of this command and control campaign are estimated to ultimately be in the billions of dollars, though Californians are just beginning to feel the pain.

They got a small dose of it two weeks ago when Bay Area Rapid Transit announced that, because of global warming, it will install solar photovoltaic panels to fuel two maintenance facilities and a passenger station in the East Bay, even though the electricity produced thereby will be double what it costs when purchased off of the grid. These politically correct, $4 million panels will generate a scant half of a megawatt of the 45 megawatts BART burns up in an hour.

Schwarzenegger has flipped his position on a number of high-profile issues. In recent interviews, he has characterized these pirouettes as salutary, the hallmark of a flexible leader who will wisely change his mind in the face of convincing new evidence.

Perhaps it is time for him to change his thinking on Global Warming.