Has the worm turned on global warming?
Oh my. One of the most frequent - and most convincing - arguments made by the global warming scaremongers has been the claim that mankind must be responsible because nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred during the last decade.

If you've seen Al Gore's propaganda movie, An Inconvenient Truth, you'll already know that the great selfserving global warming guru himself gravely repeats that statistic. And he adds that 1998 was the hottest year ever, period.

Indeed, barely a speech has been delivered or a word written by environmental activists lately which hasn't used that statistic to "prove" that the global warming critics - or, "deniers" as they so crudely put it (a cheap reference to Holocaust deniers) - are full of hot air.

Now, it seems, the worm has turned.

Thanks to the work - and the healthy skepticism - of former mining executive Stephen McIntyre, author of a blog called ClimateAudit.org, we now know that this oftrepeated claim, like so much of Gore's work, is false. Not true, period.

McIntyre first came to public attention in 2003 when he used real statistics to debunk the (in)famous "hockey stick" graph - another favorite Gore prop - which supposedly showed a recent spike in global temperatures. Earlier this month, McIntyre was at it again, notifying NASA that their calculations were wrong.

A few days later, NASA quietly revised its list of the all-time hottest years and - guess what? - not only was 1998 not the hottest year ever, 1934 was, but instead of nine of the 10 hottest years occurring in the last decade, only three have. What's more, four of the hottest years were in the 1930s, long before claim that man-made carbon dioxide is overwhelmingly responsible for pretty well everything that is currently bad in the world.

As this skeptic likes to say, if global warming is a recent invention of humans, where did all the glaciers go which used to cover most of Canada?

But we digress.

As Canwest columnist Lorne Gunter wrote about NASA's corrected numbers, "The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.

"In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late."

Mind you, the environmental fearmongers are doing their best to downplay their mistake. Even NASA officials dismiss the changes as "trivial," since they result in a reduction of just 0.15 degrees Celsius in the mean U.S. "temperature anomalies" for the years 2000 to 2006. Even McIntyre described his discovery as "a microchange. But it was kind of fun."

Not so much "fun" however for the global warming zealots who have used the old - and wrong - statistics to "prove" their case.

Look at it this way. When the numbers were reported as 0.15 degrees Celsius higher than they actually were, this was enough of a difference for Gore and his fellow travelers to warn us all that we were headed down the road to environmental hell. If it created a disaster one way, how can it be just "trivial" the other way?

And what do you think the environmentalists would say if the scientific world believed that the hottest years had been scattered throughout the last 130 years and then they suddenly discovered that it was not true, that the heat was concentrated in the last decade? They would have done what they've been doing. Put out one-side documentaries. Show up in every newspaper and every talk show in the western world predicting the end of humanity as we know it.

It would not have been dismissed by them as "trivial." And they shouldn't be allowed to get away with it when the "facts" go against them.

As noted American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh put it, "What do we have here? We have proof of man-made global warming. The man-made global warming is inside NASA ... is in the scientific community with false data."

There are many other errors in Gore's film: his depiction of melting icebergs, for example; they're melting alright, but that's normal. Some melt. Others grow. My personal favorite is Gore's phony depiction of the polar bears on a small block of ice, the inference being that the ice is melting and they are in danger. Even the photographer who took the picture admits there was lots of ice near by. It was simply a shot of the bears at play. There are more polar bears in the world now than there were 50 years ago. As former baseball manager Leo Durocher used to say, "You can look it up."

Too bad more people don't "look it up." That way, millions of innocent school children across the western world might actually be taught the facts instead of having Gore's one-side propaganda epic shoved down their collective throats.

What a concept, eh?