One thing that the Copenhagen climate conference has made strikingly clear is that global alarmism has become a mega-global industry, with a huge driving stake in self-preservation.

More than 20,000 journalists, delegates and political leaders descended on Copenhagen, Denmark, this week for the conference. This conclave of global elites has required 1,200 limousines and 140 private planes, amassing quite a carbon footprint for what, thankfully, is not expected to lead to any binding, consequential mandates for participating countries.

And that’s even with thousands of “activists” who converged on Copenhagen to push for draconian regulation of carbon emissions in industrialized Western countries.

The whole display has been carried out with painstaking efforts to ignore the recent “climategate” e-mails and data from England’s East Anglia University, which has been called the Pentagon of climate change research. The documents have revealed disturbing evidence of leading climate scientists fudging climate data, resisting freedom of information requests, manipulating peer review and undermining dissenting scientists.

As we said, climate change has become a global industry, involving billions in grants and alternative energy schemes. It is an industry that dwarfs the influence of evil “big oil” on the climate debate. This newspaper has for several years been bombarded by climate alarmist e-mails from dozens of groups that are obviously well-funded. 

And it’s all because “the science is settled.”

Well, the science is NOT settled, and a growing number of Americans recognize it. They are aware that the so-called “consensus” on global warming neglects thousands of dissenting scientists and think tanks who advance convincing arguments against re-engineering the world’s economy for the sake of preventing a couple degrees of temperature increase over the next century.

They have more pressing things in mind, such as the struggling economy, and they understand that cap-and-trade and tax-and-regulate schemes aren’t likely to help businesses or families. That’s one reason why only 35 percent of respondents to a Pew survey said global warming is a serious problem, compared with 44 percent the previous year.

Even so, as Copenhagen got under way, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doubled down this week, announcing its “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide can be regulated by the agency across the economy.

One EPA official even asserted that such regulation would be done “in a command-and-control way,” sort of a veiled threat that if Congress does not act on climate-change legislation, the EPA will.

At first glance, that’s a horrifying proposition. But there is already strong evidence that overreaching EPA regulation would be met with a bonanza of litigation from industry groups using the same legal techniques that environmental groups have used for years in compelling federal agencies to comply to their wishes.

This litigation would likely involve direct challenges to the underlying science used to propel the EPA’s regulatory efforts. And it’s likely to be proven in court that the science is not settled.