Citing a draft U.N. report claiming pollution may cause the Earth's temperature to rise by 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, Gore said at a rally last week, "My opponent says on global warming, he's not sure what the cause is, and maybe we shouldn't do anything about it or just study it . . . I have never backed down or given up on the environment and I never will in my whole life. I guaran-damn-tee-it!"

So why has Gore scarcely mentioned the issue during the campaign - even though the draft report was released last April?

In fact, the report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more political than scientific. Fourteen international experts gathered on Capitol Hill in June to review the report. They unanimously agreed it contains systematic errors and omissions bordering on scientific fraud.

The UK's Richard Courtney said the data and climate models were "no good," and "We should stop trying to predict the weather 100 years from now." Norway's Tom Segalstad said the report omitted mention of studies reporting that carbon dioxide - the major greenhouse gas of concern - was actually more prevalent in the preindustrial era than it is today.

The report also chooses which data to accept. Temperatures measured on the Earth's surface do indicate some warming, but these measurements are skewed upwards by the "urban heat island effect": Concrete and asphalt absorb heat and raise urban temperatures.

In contrast, satellite and balloon records indicate no significant warming. "The IPCC tries to prove that the satellite and balloon records are wrong. It is much more likely that these records are correct and the surface data are wrong," said New Zealand's Vincent Gray.

Germany's Peter Dietze said the report's temperature estimates are easily demonstrated to be at least four times too high. "If the [U.N. report] would be corrected for these errors, there would hardly be any justification for writing it," he said.

Temperature data estimated by examining the width of tree rings indicates no significant change over the last 1,000 years. But the U.N. report combined the tree-ring data with the surface data of rising temperatures over the last 140 years to show an alarming trend. U.S. climate expert Fred Singer says "Combining selected data in this way is simply dishonest."

None of this dishonesty is surprising. The IPCC is an arm of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change - the group pushing the Kyoto global-warming treaty. The report's science chapters were overseen by UK scientist Sir John Houghton - who very publicly made up his mind about global warming in the early 1990s. Other parts of the report were financed and overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, whose $1.7 billion budget depends on keeping the scare going.

The Clinton-Gore administration itself belies the scare: It says the United States has already met almost half of its would-be obligations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions under the Kyoto treaty. It estimates that U.S. forests, crops and soils absorb about 310 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

Doing nothing has solved half of the alleged problem. If we continue to do nothing, perhaps the problem-that-never-was will go away entirely.

Campaigning in September, Gore said "People should be able to get in their cars and drive where they want, when they want, at a low price."

But in his alarmist book, Earth in the Balance, Gore wrote "Today, we must recognize that our heavy reliance on cars . . . accounts for a large proportion of the carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere from the industrial world. Objectively, it makes little sense for each of us to burn up all the energy necessary to travel with several thousands pounds of metal wherever we go . . . "

Oops, he did it again.

Will Al Gore's hot air on global warming help his bid for the presidency? It's not "guaran-damn-teed"!

Steven Milloy is a Cato Institute adjunct scholar and publisher of Junkscience.com.