The UN has held another environmental summit in Nagoya, Japan, and the new focus is to save wild animals from extinction, rather than reducing global warming.

"It seems that Earth’s temperatures have failed to increase for 12 years, and the public is losing interest in man-made global warming," writes author Dennis T. Avery. "So, back to the cuddly wild animals as the excuse for shutting down the modern world."

However, the collapse of global warming has not prevented the New York Times during the midterm election campaign from slamming the 19 of 20 or so Republican Senate candidates who did not "accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming."

The Times condemned them as equals with Jewish Holocaust deniers.

Nowhere in the editorial did the Times recall Climategate or the other related global warming-related scandals of November 2009 which, no doubt, helped make skeptics of all of those Republican Senate candidates.

Of course, there is the problem that temperatures have ceased rising and no animal extinctions have been blamed recently on climate change.

"The UN’s problem is that we aren’t currently losing species," writes Avery. "The current wildlife extinction rate is the lowest in 500 years – according to the UN Environmental Program’s own World Atlas of Biodiversity."

Avery is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and an environmental economist. He was formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years.

"The old wooden-ship explorers have already spread Norway rats, cats, and weed seeds all over the world," writes Avery. "The extinctions on the little islands have mostly happened already.

"The last flightless dodo bird was roasted in 1681. Ancient primitive hunters have already wiped out the wooly mammoths and the cave bears."

It seems that global warming’s predicted "million lost species" haven’t been lost, or even endangered.

Numerous studies have shown that, far from the birds and butterflies going extinct, they are expanding their ranges and adopting new food habits during the modest warming of the past century.

"We’ve lost the golden toad of Costa Rica, which is sad," notes Avery. "But the peer-reviewed studies don’t blame global warming. R.O. Lawton of the University of Alabama-Huntsville found that the clearing of the forests below the golden toad’s cloud-forest home had changed the hydrology of the cloud forest."

Worried about the polar bears?

Recent studies show that the polar bear population has increased from around 5,000 to 25,000 since 1970.

"Basically, it’s the result of more responsible hunting," notes Avery. "A new paper modeled the Arctic’s ice history over the past 10,000 years."

The authors conclude that during the much-warmer centuries of the early Holocene Period (6,000-8,000 years ago) the Arctic probably was completely ice-free in some periods.

Somehow the polar bears survived the Holocene Period’s warming – without any help from the UN.

"What about the cute little pika, the smallest member of the rabbit family, which likes high-altitude rock-piles and harvests grass for winter fodder?" asks Avery. "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently told us – to howls of rage from environmental activists – that "the best available scientific information indicates that pikas will be able to survive despite higher temperatures. Pikas will have enough suitable high-elevation habitat to prevent them from becoming threatened or endangered."

One of the pikas’ favorite territories is the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Naturalist John Christy recently found "there has been no change in summer
nighttime temperatures in the adjacent Sierra Nevada Mountains.

"Summer daytime temperatures in the six-county area have actually cooled slightly since 1910."

But such facts did not bother the Times editorial board.

"The New York Times’ editorial writers have apparently spent the last 11 months in a Rip Van Winkle-like state of unconsciousness when it comes to climate change," writes Steve Milloy in Human Events magazine.

Milloy recounted how this time in 2009, a host of private and candid e-mails between climate alarmist-scientists stored at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom somehow made its way into the public domain and history.

"Like a shot heard around the world, the e-mails instantaneously validated what the climate skeptics had been saying for more than a decade about the alarmists – that they had cooked the books on global warming science and then conspired to silence and belittle their critics."

Most famously, the e-mails revealed that the alarmist community was aware and, indeed, even proud of the scientific fraud known as the "hockey stick" – a graph purporting to show that global temperatures had been stable over the last millennium and then had spiked upwards during the 20th Century, impliedly due to human activities. All this was expressed in an e-mail that featured the infamous Climategate phrase "Mike’s trick... to hide the decline."

As it turns out, the reason a "trick" was needed to "hide the decline" was that, in reality, the hockey stick data used to show global temperatures spiking during the 20th Century actually showed a decline in the later part of the 20th Century – the precise opposite phenomena that the alarmists claimed to have occurred. But the inconvenient data was intentionally deleted and replaced with other, more cooperative data.

This fraud is what prompted Virginia Atty. Gen. Ken Cuccinelli to launch an investigation into whether Virginia taxpayers were defrauded by hockey stick inventor and former University of Virginia researcher Michael Mann.

"Perhaps the real significance of Climategate is that it opened the floodgates of pent-up global skepticism. Climategate was followed in rapid succession by glacier-gate, rainforest-gate, Pachauri-gate and NASA-gate," writes Milloy.

Glacier-gate exposed the much-repeated and IPCC-official falsehood that global warming was going to cause the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. This myth was used by Sen. John Kerry to whip up frenzy about Himalayan melting leading to regional water shortages and, ultimately, war between India and Pakistan.

As it turns out though, there never was any scientific study or evidence that the glaciers were going anywhere soon. The IPCC claim about the glaciers was based on a mere 1998 telephone interview with an obscure Indian scientist that was reported in the New Scientist magazine, which by the way, is not anywhere close to a peer-reviewed science journal.

Amazon-gate involved another IPCC claim that global warming was going to destroy 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest. Once again the sourcing was dubious. It came from a report put together by the World Wildlife Fund, a radical green activist group. The report had not been independently peer-reviewed or validated.

Glacier-gate and Amazon-gate opened up the IPCC and its chief Rajendra Pachauri to a great deal of criticism and made Pachauri vulnerable to inquiries about his various conflicts of interest.

Though he positioned himself as the impartial head of the Nobel Peace prize winning IPCC, in reality Pachauri has had ties to many energy companies, including companies that planned on profiting from carbon trading. Reminiscent of another major UN scandal – oil-for-food – Pachauri-gate helps explain how glacier-gate and Amazon-gate happened.

"The still ongoing NASA-gate involves the systematic distortion of global temperature readings by the U.S. government. As revealed by a team of skeptics riding the Climategate wave, NASA researchers were exposed as improperly manipulating temperature data to produce claims such as ‘2005 was the warmest year on record,’" noted Milloy.

The researchers showed how NASA had been gradually trimming the number of temperature stations (from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,000 now) and then averaging temperature data in such a way as to produce synthetically warmer temperatures. The 2005-warmest-temperature-claim was, in fact, based on a temperature "data base" that had no original temperature data.

A fascinating aspect the past year’s meltdown in climate alarmism is that most of the facts underlying the developments weren’t newly discovered – at least to climate skeptics.

They’ve known all along, notes Milloy. However, they were ignored by the mainstream media, such as the New York Times.