Where are the American journalists who should be covering the collapse of the man-made warming scare — the biggest hoax in human history? The public, shoveling snow amid blizzard winds, wants to know. The stock market, laboring under the threat of trillion-dollar energy taxes, urgently needs to know. Even the Columbia Journalism Review, complicit in fostering the global warming scare for 20 years, is prodding America’s mainstream media to finally do their duty.

The press in England, Australia, and even India is already breaking the story:

– “The Professor’s Amazing Climate Change Retreat,” London Daily Mail, Feb. 13. “Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University confesses on the BBC that the world hasn’t warmed since 1995, and the Medieval Warming was perhaps warmer than today.”

– “World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists,” Sunday Times of London, Feb. 14.

– “The Hottest Hoax in the World,” Ninad Sheth, India’s Open Magazine, Jan. 30.

– “The Great Global Warming Collapse,” Margaret Wente, Canada’s Global & Mail, Feb. 20.

Also eagerly awaiting the media confessions is that little band of hardy souls who have been telling us for years inconvenient truths about gaps in the greenhouse theory while insisting that “the science isn’t settled” by a long shot. They’ve been accused of treason, likened to Holocaust deniers, and threatened with jail and with death for telling us that the evidence didn’t stack up. They could get no hearing — not on university campuses, not in the press, not even in their own communities. While falsely accused of “shilling for corporations,” they lost jobs, tenure, and reputations.

Professor Jones, himself a leader of the plot, has confessed that the Medieval Warming might have been global and warmer than today. Now we can look at that remarkable seabed sediment core dug up from the Atlantic floor by Boston College’s Maureen Raymo. The plankton microfossils in the mud layers go back a million years, and tell of more than 600 long, moderate, natural global warmings: Medieval, Roman, Holocene, and on back through the ages. The wildlife has all been through sudden climate change many times.

Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, pioneers of the Greenland ice cores who discovered the 1,500-year cycles named after them, can once again be science heroes, as they deserve.

What will Al Gore finally say if he ever grants an interview? Will he admit he misled us about the Antarctic ice records, which show temperatures have historically changed 800 years before the CO2 levels? That makes CO2 no more than a lagging indicator of solar changes.

As a mere economist and history buff, I will take some credit. I helped Fred Singer write a New York Times bestseller: Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1,500 Years. We presented the historic and physical evidence of the world’s past global warmings. We credited Henrik Svensmark’s demonstration that the sun’s variability is linked to earth’s temperatures by cosmic rays, which create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cyclically warm and cool our planet. And we poked holes in the scare stories being fed to the public.

Most of the world’s citizens will never realize how close they came to revisiting the Stone Age, with precious little help from solar panels, wind turbines, or biofuels.

Right now the journalists’ dereliction of duty is mainly hurting themselves. The public already fears it can’t trust its newspapers and TV networks. Any carbon taxes imposed now will be quickly rescinded. American journalists are simply building a bigger head of steam for the angry backlash when the public finally learns (probably through the internet) that they’ve been had.

Note: This article appeared in Pajamas Media on February 22, 2010

Dennis T. Avery served on the staff of the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission from its inception in 1974 until 1980. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years.