There's almost no point in talking about global warming any longer because global hysteria has long since torched reason - we are now watching the scientific equivalent of the Salem witch trials, where "what we say is true" is more important than "what we know is true."

So last week, we got to watch the spectacle of the EPA fanning the flames of fear while Al Gore fiddled like Nero as he performed his "Requiem for Fossil Fuels" to an audience of true believers.

Gore announced his "plan" to save America from herself by making the nation's electricity production "carbon free" within 10 years at a cost of a tidy $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion.

As the AP reports it, Gore's "man on the moon" plan would mean "a significant shift in where the U.S. gets its power. In 2005, coal supplied slightly more than half the nation's 3.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Nuclear power accounted for 21 percent, natural gas 15 percent and renewable sources, including wind and solar, about 8.6 percent."

Under the Gore scenario, coal goes the way of whale blubber, and is replaced by a nifty mix of nuclear power, solar, wind and, er, um, "clean coal." Of course, even Gore admits that "clean coal does not exist right now," but not to worry - the Nobel Prize-winning pied piper of peace has a plan: Tax 'em till they drop.

Of course, he means the carbon emissions will be dropping thanks to the huge penalty to be paid for "unclean coal," but just maybe it is our standard of living that will see the bigger decline. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a 284-page report that is a modern version of the plagues and scourges unleashed by Moses on ancient Egypt. If you're afraid of it, the EPA's got it - disease, insects, foul water, drought, kidney stones (or was that in another hysterical report?), fire, flooding, hurricanes, pollution, food poisoning. No wonder people are panicking about global warming even though the weather isn't getting warmer any longer.

What? Of course, it's getting warmer.

But no it isn't. Despite the endless allure of "what we say is true," sometimes we are faced with the brutal honesty of "what we know is true" and have to deal with it.

Of course, scientists who have jumped on the global warming bandwagon are reluctant to acknowledge that global temperatures have been steady or declining for the past 10 years. It's embarrassing, to say the least, to have to admit that the hysteria you promoted in the name of "science" was all just an expensive sham.

Yes, it was indeed getting warmer in the decades immediately preceding 1998, but so what? It still wasn't as warm as it had been on the planet 1,000 years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution cursed modern man with cheap power, technological innovation, drastically improved health care, sanitary living conditions, worldwide mobility, and the empowerment of the middle class.

So the question really isn't whether the earth is getting warmer, but so what if it is? Does anyone really think that mankind is in charge of the planetary climate? There are long-term cycles at work here which are as much beyond our control as the orbit of the Earth around the sun. (OK, folks, let's all lean north to see if we can straighten this damn planet out - the tilt of 23.44 degrees from the perpendicular may just be what is making us all dizzy!)

The most likely reasons for global warming such as solar variability and geothermal dynamic fluctuation are the very same reasons why temperatures sometimes go down as well as up. You remember the great ice ages, don't you?

But the fact is that scientists don't know what is going to happen to the temperature 20 years from now anymore than the TV weatherman does. If they did, then the projections they have been making for the past 20 years would actually be correct, instead of myopically out of whack. We haven't seen anything like the temperature increase projected, nor has the sea level risen cataclysmically as Al Gore and his cronies have promised.

So the EPA's report about the devastating effect of global warming on the United States should probably be taken with a grain of salt, or lots of them. Because unlike Lot's wife, who turned into a pillar of salt when she turned back to see from where she had come, most of us will probably look back in 20 years and see not the rubble of civilization but the ruins of an idea whose time thankfully never came.

Requiescat in pace, global warming.

• Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com

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