Environment: Global warming hasn't been a point of contention in the presidential campaign. This is as it should be, because it's not a real issue. Earth's temperature is about the same now was it was in 1997.

In fact, we don't believe it's ever been a real issue. Global warming has always been an idea, a guess. We've never been satisfied that man's small contributions to the carbon dioxide level in our atmosphere were causing the planet to overheat.

The global warming alarmists always liked to point to the "hockey stick" graph that supposedly showed temperatures flatlining for about 900 years before shooting sharply upward starting around 1900. Now that chart has been discredited.

With that in mind, we invite the alarmists to take a look at a graph produced by the Met Office, the official weather forecaster of the United Kingdom.

It shows that global temperatures have been up and down since 1997 but are at the same place they were at the beginning of that year.

"This means that the 'plateau' or 'pause' in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996," writes Daily Mail reporter David Rose.

"Before that," Rose continued, "temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years."

The global temperature data set was compiled by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, the band of alarmist scientists whose work has been called into question by the Climate-gate scandal. The data showing no temperature change, Rose noted, were issued with little fanfare.

The Met Office tried to marginalize Rose's report, saying that "choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading."

"Climate change," said the British weathermen, "can only be detected from multidecadal timescales."

Right. Like that "multidecadal timescale" of 1980-96, a warm period that allegedly confirmed man-made global warming was indeed happening.

It isn't dead yet, but the global warming game is winding down. Fraud always has an expiration date.