his past Saturday, readers of the New York Times woke up to an alarming and overwrought front-page story complete with photos about the hole in the ice over the North Pole. Apparently holiday cruisers in the Arctic were dismayed to discover that they could not have their pictures snapped while standing on ice floes at the pole. The Times opined that "the last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water was more than 50 million years ago."

Harvard climatologist and head of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group 2 (and rabid global-warming proponent), James McCarthy told the Times that "there was a sense of alarm" on the part of the holidaymakers who concluded that "global warming is real."

"Maybe McCarthy ought to have consulted the U.N.'s own arctic temperature record," says University of Virginia climatologist Patrick Michaels. "That record clearly shows no net warming in summer time arctic temperatures for the past 70 years."

  In fact, arctic temperatures were as warm in the 1930s and 1940s as they are today, and probably the reason no one saw open water in the far north back then is that vacationers didn't tend to cruise to the pole during the Depression and World War II. Even National Public Radio, not known for its global-warming skepticism, pointed out that as arctic ice shifts under the influence of wind and tide, it cracks — revealing open water anywhere from time to time.

  But then that wouldn't have been a front page story in the midst of a presidential campaign — a campaing in which one contender is the world's leading political proponent of imminent global-warming catastrophe.