To hear former U.S. vice-president Al Gore tell it, we really are, as the old hippie

anthem predicted, standing on the eve of destruction. Why? Global warming, of course.

Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential race to George W. Bush, has been basking in overwhelmingly positive media coverage from his current environmental doomsday film entitled "An Inconvenient Truth."

The real inconvenient truth, alas, is that much of what Gore baldly claims as absolute "truths" is either a)-completely twisted or b)dead wrong.

Gore even vented against Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to not embrace the deeply flawed Kyoto Plan, expressing amazement that Canada, of all countries, would not understand that climate change caused by CO2 emissions is "the biggest crisis in the history of this country."

A clip of his film shown recently on CBC Newsworld solemnly introduced by the admiring interviewer as "Scary stuff" showed a world devastated by floods which would have made Noah blush.

"The Arctic is experiencing faster melting," claims Gore. "If this were to go, sea levels worldwide would go up 20 feet. This is what would happen in Florida, around Shanghai, home to 40 million people, the area around Calcutta, 60 million. Here in Manhattan. The World Trade Centre Memorial would be under water. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees. And then imagine 100 million. Our ability to live is what is at stake."

Pretty scary stuff, indeed. But it's hokum, the real dangers overstated beyond the point of the absurd.

Here's an "inconvenient truth" which Gore and his fellow travelers in the climate change theocracy may wish to ponder:

Humans add three billion tonnes that's gigatonnes, or GT each year to the atmosphere's CO2 load. At first blush, that's a lot. In reality, as Ottawa's High Park Group pointed out, it represents less than half of 1% of the atmosphere's total CO2 content. Repeat that. Less than half of 1%.

Water vapour which is something even Gore has no control over constitutes 95% of greenhouse gases by volume.

You might also compare our three billion tonnes of CO2 production to the 210 billion tonnes per year of greenhouse gas produced by the earth's oceans and land.

As for flooding the world, Dr Chris de Freitas, a prominent New Zealand climate scientist responded to Gore's sensational claims by assuring him "that no one from the South Pacific island has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific."

The same is true about Gore's claim one of the more oft-repeated claims in the Canadian media that global warming is putting our Arctic polar bears at risk.

Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager, wildlife research section, Department of Environment, Nunavit, was cited recently saying that seven of the 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic more than half the world's total are either "stable or increasing... Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change..." And even that, it seems, isn't a sure thing one-way or the other.

And so it goes. Apocalyptic claim are apocalyptic claim. Reams of happy headlines for the publicity-seeking politician. More government and public funds flowing into the growing climate change industry. Pamphleteering replacing journalism in environmental reportage.

Naturally, Gore doesn't miss the opportunity to exploit the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He claims it got "stronger and stronger and stronger" as it came over the Gulf of Mexico. Actually, it didn't. It began as a category 5 over the ocean and was downgraded to category 3 when it reached landfall.

More importantly, hurricane specialist Ted Murty, former senior research scientist at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and now a University of Ottawa adjunct professor of Earth sciences, told the Financial Post last week that claims of an increase in hurricanes caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions are untrue.

There have been increases in the North Atlantic, he says, but "in all other six ocean basins where tropical cyclones occur, there is either a flat or a downward trend." He says the most intense U.S. hurricanes occurred in 1900, 1926 and 1935. As for the increase in North Atlantic hurricanes, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, says that global warming has nothing to do with it.

The point here is not that we shouldn't be concerned at all with greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting emissions, no matter how minor our contribution, isn't a bad thing.

But the end of the earth is not upon us. So let's deal with the science rather than running off in all directions at once and spending untold billions to combat a crisis which really only exists in the minds of self-serving, politicized propagandists and their assorted surrogates.