LET'S take stock of the great global warming scare and see how it's panning out.

First, the planet hasn't actually warmed for a decade - or even 15 years - according to new temperature data released by Britain's Met Office.

Hmm. That's not what global warming scientists predicted.

Look out of your window. The rain that Climate Commissioner Tim Flannery said in 2007 "isn't actually going to fill our dams and river systems" any more has just flooded NSW and Queensland yet again.

The Bureau of Meteorology - which three years ago warned "we are just not going to have that sort of good rain again" - now admits last year was our third wettest on record.

The snowfalls that the University of East Anglia in 2000 said would soon become "a very rare and exciting event" are falling as hard as ever.

The monster hurricanes we were told to expect by Nobel Prize winner Al Gore are coming no more often.

The massive coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef that warmist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg predicted would occur every second year from 2010 has not been seen in years.

Wherever you look it's the same wake-up-to-yourself story. Sea levels have recently dipped, the oceans have lately cooled, Arctic ice has not retreated since 2007, polar bears are increasing in numbers, global crop yields keep rising and now some solar scientists warn not of global warming, but cooling -- a far deadlier threat.

So what was that warming scare all about?

And how do the warming activists respond to this increasing evidence contradicting their theory that our carbon dioxide is heating the world dangerously?

Simple - they close their eyes in denial.

Take Professor Naomi Oreskes, the author of Merchants of Doubt who famously tried to prove that not one scientific paper dissented from the global warming "consensus".

Last week she complained people still "cling to the idea it is reasonable to maintain an open mind -- It isn't".

To have an academic demand a closed mind on anything, let alone global warming, is a shock.

It shows she's talking not about science but a faith which cannot be doubted.

Her view is depressingly echoed by much of the media, which for years has whipped up the warming scare, refusing to report on scientists who queried it, and demonising the open-minded as "deniers".

They, too, believe a closed mind -- and closed ears -- is how to deal with inconvenient truths of the kind I've listed.

Examples? I remember mentioning on the ABC's Insiders the indisputable fact that the warming had paused, only to be heckled by one fellow panellist while the other, the Sydney Morning Herald's David Marr, theatrically buried his head in a newspaper. Not listening, la la la la la.

What has made the deliberate know-nothingness of such journalists so damaging is that, perversely, in no other country has the media more hysterically spruiked the warming creed.

Warmist researchers from the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado in Boulder have counted how often 50 papers around the world mentioned "global warming" or "climate change" and found that in every year from 2006 to 2011 Australian papers beat the rest of the world.

But see how some of the most obsessed outlets -- especially The Age and the ABC -- resist reporting the growing evidence that the late 20th century warming that's blamed on man's emissions has halted, and that few of the catastrophic consequences predicted have happened.

Man-made emissions do indeed affect the climate in some small way, but not necessarily for the worst and certainly not by as much as many natural influences - some of which may have us heading for cooling.

Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at Denmark's National Space Institute, is one of several scientists investigating the effects of the sun and cosmic rays on our climate.

Last week he warned that a recent cut in the sun's output could soon reverse any man-made warming.

"World temperatures may end up a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more," he said. Who knows if he's right? Best keep an open mind, on this -- and on man-made warming.

Or, as Harvard University physicist Mike Stopa warned last week: "It is possible that CO2 has effectively no influence on global climate."

And he asked: "Suppose it turns out that CO2 has essentially nothing to do with the Earth's climate.

"How will the history of this colossal mistake be written?"

Originally published as Global warming gets cold shoulder