It’s getting warmer? Oops

Contrary to what Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio say, the global warming debate is not over. Hysterical warnings about flooded coastlines and boiled polar bears remain nothing more than hot-air predictions. Their belief in an approaching apocalypse is based on nothing more than theory and blind faith, when the measures they advocate -- the dismantling of capitalist economies and making energy unaffordable for the masses -- demand hard evidence.

Well, the latest data on climate change is in and, not surprisingly, it favors the "deniers."

The United Nations World Meteorological Organization, the body that provides climate models to the U.N.'s alarmist global warming panel, reported last week that not only have world temperatures remained stable for the past decade, but that global average temperatures for 2008 will be cooler than those of 2007.

Call us crazy, but that has to make it hard to sell the public on giving up their cars and detached homes in favor of mass transit and high-rise tenements.

Let's put it this way: If a sports betting tout told you to wager the mortgage payment on a supposedly "hot" basketball team that had, in fact, lost 10 games in a row -- that had done nothing the so-called experts predicted -- would you at least ask a few questions before buying the ticket?

The global warming gurus assure us that a decade without, you know, global warming, has a perfectly rational explanation, and that humanity's wasteful standard of living is still a sure bet to replace Canadian winters with Las Vegas summers by the end of the century. The Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, a cooler-than-normal expanse of water, is responsible for milder temperatures in the normally balmy equatorial region. China and West Asia have cooled off as well, the WMO reported.

The La Nina current is expected to hang around the rest of the year. After that, we're back on the express elevator to Hades.

"For detecting climate change you should not look at any particular year, but instead examine the trends over a sufficiently long period of time," said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. "And the trend of temperature globally is still very much indicative of warming."

The La Nina current is "part of what we call 'variability,' " he said.

But as Investor's Business Daily wrote in a Friday editorial: "Why can't the Pacific's El Nino current, which played a large part in the warm reading for 1998, simply be seen as a 'variability' and not part of a greater warming trend?" Variability is code for "data that don't support our cause."

To wit: Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Gore and others were quick to contend that the 2005 super-storm resulted from global warming, and that such devastating hurricane seasons would be the norm for years to come. The relatively uneventful 2006 and 2007 seasons? Those must be "variability."

In fact, if the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were your local weatherman, a pink slip would have landed in its mailbox a long time ago. A study in last year's International Journal of Climatology determined the temperature increases predicted by the hyperpolitical body's climate models have already been proved unreliable, throwing every doomsday theory the greens can muster into question.

That won't stop the greens from preaching the gospel of global warming. And it certainly won't stop their media enablers from reporting it as truth -- witness the lack of news reports on the WMO data.

But bit by bit, cold, hard, scientific fact is deflating many assertions of the climate change alarmists.