More than 20 years ago, when I was a freshman in college, I met some people who were involved in something called "The Alliance for Survival." They were anti-nuclear activists. They loved whales, trees, endangered species of all kinds and little fishies. They opposed nuclear power because it was bad for the environment and for the future of the world.

Little did I realize that the organizers and leaders of this group were leftist radicals who hated the U.S. military and the free market. Their real goal was the nuclear disarmament of the United States. I didn't discover this until a friend took me to one of their marches, which included a candle-light vigil. The speeches that I heard at the event did not evidence much love and concern for the environment, but were instead filled with a burning hatred of the United States, the U.S. armed forces and the capitalist system.

The Alliance for Survival was not merely an environmentalist group. It was one of those false fronts in which environmental concerns were hijacked and used to fuel a socialist revolution. Direct experience with those people opened my eyes, and for the first time I saw how causes could be manipulated and exploited by people with a hidden agenda.

This was my first lesson in environmental politics. More recently I was invited to a dinner party at the house of a leading Green Party official here in California. (Believe it or not, the Green Party has successfully gotten one of their numbers elected mayor in the north coastal town of Arcata and another elected to the California State Assembly.) The Greens are nice enough people, civic minded and generous, but it turns out they are mostly socialists of one stripe or another -- though none of them care for the Marxist label.

One of the leading Green Party organizers I met was kind enough to give me a basic history lesson on the environmental movement. Just as my eyes were about to glaze over, he said that he owed everything to his grandparents. They had been his political teachers.

"Were they Green Party activists?" I asked.

Suddenly he looked as though he'd bitten down on something unpleasant. "They were Communists," he confessed.

In fact, they were members of the Communist Party USA. And yes, they had taught him how to think about politics -- how to distrust capitalism, big business, and the Pentagon. Of course, he was not a Communist himself. Instead, he exemplified the watermelon: green on the outside, red on the inside.

It should be said that concern for the environment is not to be equated with socialism or Marxism. That's not the message I want to convey. But a dirty hijacking job has taken place. Socialists have inserted themselves into a decent cause -- a valid set of concerns -- and by a combination of exaggeration and imposition they have succeeded in finding a back door for inserting elements of their revolutionary agenda into national policy-making.

The greatest and most sinister example can be found in the politics of "global warming." It has been shown that modern industrialization has led to an increase in the production of greenhouse gases within the earth's atmosphere. This, in turn, is supposedly heating up the planet and melting the polar icecaps. If this process is allowed to continue there will be a catastrophe.

Because of my familiarity with the environmentalist camp, I never treated global warming seriously. But I was recently surprised to hear an intelligent conservative assure me that global warming had been scientifically proved. This took me by surprise, so I did some checking.

According to Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, a top professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and an advisor to the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Satellite measurements over the last 30 years show no sign of [global] warming."

In other words, there is little scientific evidence that the planet is getting warmer. The many studies you read about in the newspapers are inconclusive. Check for yourself and read the fine print. The wild assertions of the environmental alarmists cannot to be trusted, even if some of these alarmists have managed to acquire scientific credentials. According to Prof. Lindzen, the climate fluctuations of recent years are within the normal range. To cite just one example, recent studies on the melting of the icecaps are based on very questionable assumptions.

Then what about the so-called scientific models which show a definite increase in global temperatures over the next 50 years? According to Lindzen, these future projections are based on unproven computer-generated models. While it is true that there has been a 25 percent increase in carbon dioxide within the earth's atmosphere since 1850, the idea that this results in global warming is itself a theory which has yet to be proved.

Prof. Lindzen tells us that we don't really understand how the atmosphere works. He also points out that most important greenhouse gas is -- believe it or not -- water vapor. As for the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming, most meteorologists and climate scientists remain unconvinced by the evidence so far presented on global warming.

So why do most people believe the earth is getting hotter? How could a well-informed conservative come to assume that global warming is scientific fact when most climate experts simply don't believe in it?

Global warming is one of socialism's Trojan horses. Like the Trojan Horse of Greek legend, it is meant to catch us off guard. According to the ancient story, the Greeks built a giant hollow horse and hid soldiers inside of it. The Trojans thought it a gift and wheeled it inside the city. When the city was asleep the Greek soldiers emerged and attacked the defenders from inside.

The socialists are experts in the construction of Trojan horses -- in social policy, military affairs, diplomacy, sociology, history and education. In terms of environmental policy, what they are aiming at is a climate treaty in which the United States and other middle class countries are stripped of their wealth because of their carbon dioxide emissions. Socialism, in theory, wants to smash capitalism. How can this be accomplished? Find a way to rob the rich countries and give to the poor ones. Global warming facilitates this plan.

In reality the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor will destroy the successful economies of the middle class countries, while encouraging stagnation and corruption in the "emerging" economies of the poor nations. The whole world would suffer ruination by this scheme. The equality thus achieved would be an equality of shared misery. Global capitalism would indeed suffer a severe defeat.

Prof. Lindzen is not afraid to tell the truth about this. As an advisor to the United Nations on climate change he has publicly stated that the world's leaders know there is "little scientific justification for a climate treaty." In fact, they aren't interested in discussing the science of global warming, because such a discussion goes against their political program. "This is all politics," says Lindzen. "It really has little to do with climate or global warming."

We need to be skeptical today. We need to realize that many of the media images and messages we receive have been generated by our enemies. As is a rule of thumb, whenever a new "truth" appears, if that "truth" is then used to justify the wholesale plundering of our country and the transfer of our wealth to foreigners, then you can be sure that this so-called "truth" is nothing more than an attack by enemies, malcontents and revolutionaries.

The question we ought to ask, in this context, is why we have allowed the nation's enemies, malcontents and revolutionaries to get so far with their crazy schemes?