You'd never know it from media coverage of the climate change issue, but over the past year, several "facts" about global warming have been debunked entirely or were radically altered.

Almost all Democratic candidates who ran in the midterm elections tried to push climate change as a major issue.  It didn't work, but time after time, Democrats repeated the same half-truths and myths that have been used for years to push a radical global warming agenda. 

The Global Warming Policy Forum, a London-based think-tank, supports "open and skeptical" science and policy research, as well as a balanced approach to the question of climate change.  This kind of hardheaded realism is badly needed to counter the outright hysteria of climate alarmists.  The GWPF came up with a list of the 12 debunked climate scares of 2018.  Here are a few:

PARIS (AFP) – Earth's surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study released Wednesday (Jan 17) which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions.

A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet's temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature.

This is the most persistent myth advanced by climate change hysterics – that unless we do something now about global warming, we'll all be dead by 2100.  That may have been the prediction a decade ago, but gradually, over the years, even the IPCC predictions have become less dire.

You may recall the above report by the BBC, which described how bad last year's Atlantic hurricane season was, before commenting at the end: "A warmer world is bringing us a greater number of hurricanes and a greater risk of a hurricane becoming the most powerful category 5."  I fired off a complaint, which at first they did their best to dodge.  After my refusal to accept their reply, they have now been forced to back down.

In fact, no major hurricane made landfall in the U.S. between 2005 and 2017.  And the prediction that storms would become more severe just hasn't panned out.

NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally says his new study will show, once again, the eastern Antarctic ice sheet is gaining enough ice to offset losses in the west.

The question of polar ice growth or shrinkage – either the North or the South Pole – continues to bedevil scientists.  But climate hysterics have accepted as an article of faith that the ice is disappearing.  And then there are the poor, starving polar bears:

The narrative behind the viral photo of a polar bear starving, reportedly thanks to climate change, has been called into question by the National Geographic photographer who took it in the first place.

Try, try again, guys.

The issue of "coral bleaching" is a favorite of hysterics.  This issue also can be dropped from the alarmists' agenda:

Coral bleaching has been a regular feature of the Great Barrier Reef for the past 400 years, with evidence of repeated mass events dating back to well before Euro­pean settlement and the start of the industrial revolution.

What runs through all these myths is the political calculation that people, scared to death, will hand politicians and bureaucrats enormous power to control our lives by controlling energy.  It's really just a simple power grab played out on a planetwide scale.  But as long as skeptical scientists aren't put in jail or burned at the stake for their beliefs, that power grab will be stymied.