It takes real dedication to "prove" that a 500-year flood event is nothing out of the ordinary, but Roger Pielke, Terence Corcoran and the National Post are nothing if not committed.

Using a statistical trick that would be dismissed in any debating club, Post Business Editor Corcoran argues that the recent round of U.S. flooding can in no way be linked to climate change. In fact, according to his graph, you might be left with the impression that flood damage is actually receding in these weather-battered times.

In one of his periodic diatribes against science, scientists and any risk analyst who thinks that 95% certainty is enough to cause concern about global warming, the National Post's Peter Foster has attacked Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver - using an argument that the newspaper has admitted, twice before, is flat-out untrue.

So, rude as it is to ask, we have to wonder if Mr. Foster is

a) an incredibly slow learner;

b) not a frequent reader of his newspaper's "Corrections" feature;

c) so ideologically blinded that evidence just doesn't matter to him; or

d) on the take?

The National Post, having humiliated itself on the weekend with an assault on everything from Mother Teresa to UN peacekeeping has offered a Counterpoint today that reads awfully like a mea culpa.

Entitled Hate Al Gore All You Like, Global Warming is Real, the article by CFRB DJ John Moore rips into the Post's anti-Gore screed and especially business editor Terence Corcoran's desperate effort to suggest that the science behind climate change is still somehow uncertain.

The fading National Post chose sides today: in a snarling attack on the Nobel Committee decision to award a Peace Prize to Al Gore, The Post went on to condemn other Nobel recipients, dismissing the work of Mother Teresa, the goals of nuclear disarmament and the heroism of UN peacekeepers - among whom Canadian soldiers have always played a major role.

The Post also badly misrepresented the judgment from a U.K. judge who has endorsed the continued showing of Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in U.K. schools.

What the Post has apparently failed to grasp is that, in any contest with Post business editor Terence Corcoran on one side and Mother Teresa and Al Gore on the other, Al Gore wins.

Here's a vintage piece from Canada's National Post, a long non sequitur that presumes to prove that CO2 is not threat - by calling it benign and by suggesting that there really isn't that much of it around.

Update I: Gunter's column was re-published in the Vancouver Sun today .

In this response to Terence Corcoran's Suzuki attack earlier this week (Crude, Simple and Impoverished Thinking), University of BC Trudeau Scholar David R. Boyd dismsantles Corcoran's argument that Canada's poor environmental performance is an inevitable consequence of our strong economy.