ONCE global warming was the "great moral challenge of our generation". Or so claimed the Prime Minister.

But suddenly it's the great con that's falling to bits around Kevin Rudd's ears.

In fact, so fast is global warming theory collapsing that in his flurry of recent speeches to outline his policies for the new decade, Rudd has barely mentioned his "moral challenge" at all.

Take his long Australia Day reception speech on Sunday. Rudd talked of our ageing population and of building stuff, of taxes, hospitals and schools - but dared not say one word about the booga booga he used to claim could destroy our economy, Kakadu, the Great Barrier Reef and 750,000 coastal homes.

What's happened?

Answer: in just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.

Here are just the top 10 new signs that catastrophic man-made warming may be just another beat-up, like swine flu, SARS, and the Y2K bug.

1. Climategate

THE rot for Rudd started last November with the leaking of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of Britain's University of East Anglia.

Those emails from many of the world's top climate scientists showed them conspiring to sack sceptical scientists from magazines, hide data from sceptics, and cover up errors.

One of the scientists, CRU boss Phil Jones, even boasted of having found a "trick" to "hide the decline" in recent temperature records.

Jones was also on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so influential in convincing us our gasses are heating the planet that it won the Nobel Prize.

But he showed how political the IPCC actually is by promising in yet another email that he and another colleague would do almost anything to keep sceptical studies out of IPCC reports.

Just as damning was the admission by IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth that the world isn't warming as the IPCC said it must: "We cannot account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

2. The Copenhagen farce

MORE than 40,000 politicians, scientists and activists flew to Copenhagen last month - in clouds of greenhouse gasses - to get all nations to agree to make the rest of us cut our own emissions to "stop" global warming.

This circus ended in total failure. China, the world's biggest emitter, refused to choke its growth. So did India. Now the United States is unlikely to make cuts, either, with Barack Obama's presidency badly wounded and the economy so sick.

Not only did this show that Rudd's planned tax on our emissions will now be even more suicidally useless. It also suggested world leaders can't really think global warming is so bad.

3. The Himalayan scare

RUDD has quoted the IPCC as his authority on global warming, claiming it's a group of "guys in white coats" who "just measure things". But the IPCC also just makes things up.

Take this claim from its 2007 report: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate."

In fact, we now know this bizarre claim was first made by a little-known Indian scientist in an interview for an online magazine, and then copied into a report by the green group WWF.

From there, the IPCC lifted it almost word for word for its own 2007 report, without checking if it was true.

It wasn't, of course, as the IPCC last week conceded. The glaciers will be around for at least centuries more.

But why did the IPCC run this mad claim in the first place?

The IPCC's Dr Murari Lal, the co-ordinating lead author responsible, says he knew all along there was no peer-reviewed research to back it up.

"(But) we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians ... "

Note: you are told not the truth, but what will scare you best.

4. Pachauri's response

BUT what smells just as much is how IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, a former railway engineer, first tried to defend this "mistake" by accusing sceptical scientists of practising "voodoo science".

Deny and abuse. That's the IPCC way.

Even more suspiciously, Syed Hasnain, the scientist who first made the false claim, then turned out to be now employed by The Energy Research Institute, headed by ... er, Pachauri.

More astonishing still, only two weeks ago TERI won up to $500,000 from the Carnegie Corporation to study exactly Hasnain's bogus claim. See how cash follows a good scare?

5. Pachauri's conflicts

IN fact, Pachauri and TERI do amazingly well from his IPCC job.

Britain's Sunday Telegraph this month revealed TERI had created a global business network since Pachauri became IPCC chairman in 2002.

Its recent donors include Deutsche Bank, Toyota, Yale University - and, sadly, Rudd, who last year handed over $1 million, hoping to win influence with such a big UN honcho.

Pachauri himself is now a director or adviser to a score of banks, investment institutions and carbon traders, many involved in areas directly affected by IPCC policies.

He denies any wrongdoing, and is not paid by the IPCC. But see again how cash follows a scare, and ask if the IPCC chief has a conflict of interest.

6. The green hand revealed

WE'VE seen how the IPCC just copied its false claims about the Himalayas from a report by WWF, a green activist group which earn donations by preaching such doom.

In fact, the IPCC's 2007 report cites WWF documents as "evidence" at least another 15 times.

Elsewhere it cites a non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed paper from another activist body, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, as its sole proof that global warming could devastate African agriculture.

Whose agenda is the IPCC pushing?

7. More fake IPCC claims

THIS week came more evidence that the IPCC sexed up its 2007 report, this time when it claimed the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s", thanks to global warming.

In fact, the claim was picked out of an unpublished report by a London risk consultant, who later changed his mind and said "the idea that catastrophes are rising in cost because of climate change is completely misleading".

8. New research on our gasses

AT least four new papers by top scientists cast doubt on the IPCC claim that our carbon dioxide emissions are strongly linked to global warming.

One, published in Nature, shows the world had ice age activity even when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level of our pre-industrial times.

Another, by NASA medallist John Christy and David Douglass, shows global temperatures did not go up as much as expected from man-made emissions over the past three decades.

9. New Australian research

JAMES Cook University researcher Peter Ridd says Australian scientists have cried wolf over the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from global warming, and the reef was actually in "bloody brilliant shape". The alarmist CSIRO this month also backed away from blaming global warming for a drought in Tasmania and in the Murray-Darling basin, saying "the jury is still out". A new paper by another Australian academic, Assoc Prof Stewart Franks, says the Murray-Darling drought is natural, and has nothing to do with man-made warming.

10. The world still won't warm

AND still the world hasn't warmed since 2001, even though we pump out more emissions than ever.

Even professional alarmist Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers, admits "we haven't seen a continuation of that (warming) trend" and "the computer modelling and the real world data disagree".

And with Europe, the United States and China hit with record cold and snow this winter, no wonder Kevin Rudd has suddenly gone cold on global warming, the mad faith that has cost us so many futile billions already.

Originally published as The billion-dollar hoax