Those who are wondering why Al Gore chose to publicly resurface in a Washington Post interview last Thursday with that paper’s ever-pliable Journolist founder Ezra Klein only need to look in three places.

First, there’s the recently revealed empirical evidence that the “global warming” movement’s claim of increased extreme weather event occurrences isn’t true. Second, there’s a new summary of historical research which blows up its infamous core “hockey stick” chart forecasting unprecedented, accelerating warming. Finally, there’s a new report due to arrive in a month from an increasingly desperate United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late September, the IPCC, laughably described by the wire service AFP as “an expert body set up in 1988 to provide neutral advice on global warming and its impacts,” will release its next set of statist advocacy for a worldwide carbon-tax regime disguised as “scientific data.” Gore’s mission is clearly to start greasing the skids for the IPCC’s next round of hysteria.

Gore told WaPo’s Klein that the earth is already suffering the negative consequences of failing to act against “global warming.” He claims that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it,” and that “the appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

There’s no doubt that the worldwide press’s emphasis on “extreme weather events” has been greater. Virtually every such occurrence will cause one or more journalists, politicians or both to claim it as definitive or presumptive “proof” of the existence of “global warming” and the urgent need to combat it.

The trouble is, the actual incidence of “extreme weather events” has not increased.

In mid-July, University of Colorado environmental scientist Roger Pielke testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. What he had to say surely did not please Democrats and socialists on the committee, including California’s Barbara Boxer, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse, and Vermont’s Bernie Sanders:

“Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900,” Pielke added. “The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970.”

… (He also noted) that U.S. floods have not increased in “frequency or intensity” since 1950 and economic losses from floods have dropped by 75 percent as a percentage of GDP since 1940. Tornado frequency, intensity, and normalized damages have also not increased since 1950, and Pielke even notes that there is some evidence that this has declined.

… droughts have been shorter, less frequent, and have covered a smaller portion of the U.S over the last century. Globally, there has been very little change in the last 60 years, he said.

Based on his bio and credentials, leftists tempted to trash Pielke’s reputation would be well advised to pick a different target.

Now, let’s get to that “hockey stick.”

In an August 14 post at CO2Science.org, the web site of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Craig Idso, the organization’s chairman and past president, posted a lengthy summary of others’ research dating back 15 years relating to what happened during the Medieval Warm Period in the Arctic.

Those who have followed the work of “global warming” advocates disguised as scientists for some time may recall that Penn State’s Michael Mann and his cohort were determined, as seen in the leaked Climategate emails, to “get rid of” the Medieval Warm Period, so that their beloved “hockey stick” would remain nearly straight before turning up sharply during the past few decades and into the future.

Idso, who has a Ph.D. in Geography and has authored several peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate-related topics, painstakingly ran down the results of 17 studies attempting to reconstruct surface temperatures in Greenland and other Arctic areas during the past millennium.

Every study he reviewed supports Idso’s conclusion (italics are his):

… the Arctic – which climate models suggest should be super-sensitive to greenhouse-gas-induced warming – is still not even as warm as it was several centuries ago during portions of the Medieval Warm Period, when there was much less CO2 and methane in the air than there is today, which facts further suggest that the planet’s more modest current warmth need not be the result of historical increases in these two trace greenhouse gases.

Eight of those studies predate the thousand-year global extension of Mann’s “hockey stick” in 2003, meaning that he had to deliberately ignore a huge swath of scientific evidence which, if honestly considered, would have caused to him to throw it into the trash. Instead, he and others associated with the IPCC essentially pretended that no other meaningful contradictory information existed.

In other words, Mann’s “hockey stick” is a bunch of what Colonel Potter of the TV series M*A*S*H used to call “horse hockey.”

It’s hard to see how the IPCC can regain the momentum for taking action against something that clearly isn’t happening. There has been no warming for 15 years, and some evidence of slight cooling since 2002.

I suspect that IPCC and its supporters will have no choice but to resort to leftists’ traditional fallback tactics. That is, they’ll try to act as if damning contradictory information doesn’t exist or is unimportant, and they’ll ramp up their demonization of so-called “deniers.”

That act is wearing very thin. I’d like to believe that it won’t be effective, but that belief depends heavily on continued vigilance on the part of those who insist on following the science where it takes them, instead of making up “science” to fit a statist agenda.