Later this spring after the termination of our interminable winter--the Clinton-Gore administration is going to announce that the US supports legally binding reductions in emissions of the greenhouse gases forecast to cause dreaded global warming. This significant change in policy will be pronounced by the vice president most likely in an address at George Washington University.

Vice President Al Gore knows this is going to be the sell of his life because something is very wrong with the sureshot forecasts of climate apocalypse that cored his best-selling 1992 book "Earth in the Balance." There, he made great political hay out of an apparent "scientific consensus" of dramatic warming, supported by a United Nations report stating that the climate models projecting gloom and doom were "generally realistic." Mr Gore labeled anyone with a Ph.D. in Climatology (there are fewer than 50 such individuals in the world) who might disagree as a member of "a small but vocal band of skeptics"

It turns out these " skeptics" were right, and Mr. Gore can't ignore it. What was heresy four years ago--that the climate models were forecasting way too much warming--is now "consensus." Scientists who said satellites were finding no warming whatsoever were ridiculed, and journalists were remonstrated by Mr. Gore to ignore them. Now they're being lionized because they saw what was happening first. After nearly two full decades, the satellites find nothing but a statistically significant cooling averaged over the entire southern half of the planet.

The currently fashionable explanation is that the warming is being "hidden" by other industrial compounds, namely finely divided sulfate aerosols that screen the sun and brighten the clouds. They are almost exclusively found in the industrial Northern Hemisphere and they rain out before they head south of the equator.

Obviously, the fashionable explanation is pretty darned wrong. Otherwise the Southern Hemisphere would be warming up with apocalyptic abandon. When this was pointed out in a densely written article in the Dec. 12 edition of Nature proponents of the current fashion were forced to agree.

You never read about that because of Mr. Gore's deal with the environmental journalists: Don't report any good news and I'll treat you right when I become president. Just report (or construe, make up, whatever) bad news.

Need proof? The press was all over an article, in the very same issue of Nature stating that fossil records from 1,000 years age show more frequent droughts in the Upper Midwest. It just happened to be warmer then, so global warming must make more droughts there in the future. Nobody mentioned that the droughts of AD 1200 occurred without any assistance from mankind and were and are as natural as floods, hurricanes, normal rainfall, and frozen Washington.

So how is Mr. Gore going to sell his commitment to the greatest economic intervention in the history of man? Extremism! OK, the planet isn't as warm as I said it would be, but there are more "extreme" events. He is already on record as saying that "intense rainfalls have increased in summer over agricultural regions."

Here he uses the work of federal climatologist Tom Karl, who recently put out a press release which just happened to be concurrent with the California floods, saying "extreme" rains are increasing and that other "extreme" indicators are going along. Mr. Karl informed us there was no pressure to report these results or exaggerate.

What Mr. Karl actually found is that there has been an increase averaged across the country of one day in every 730 in which it rains 2 inches or more. That's right--one in every two years--something that neither you or I would notice unless we had been stunned into true belief by our beneficent government. Three inch rains are just too infrequent to show a significant trend averaged across the United States, according to Mr. Karl.

Mr. Karl and Mr. Gore call two-inchers "extreme" and "torrential," respectively. More likely, they're "beneficial," because a full 70 percent of all rainstorms that are greater than 2 inches are less than 3. Find me a Midwestern farmer who generally would rather not have that rain, given the fact that our average summer puts the Corn Belt in moisture stress.

Mr. Karl also has looked at what should be the most obvious sign of Apocalypse Soon--the percent of the United States that is experiencing much-above-normal temperatures. No significant change is detectable since 1910, the start of his study. What about extreme cold? Indeed: there has been a significant reduction in the percent of the country covered by extremely cold temperatures since 1910. This is consistent with other work that shows that the airmass that most reflects climate change is the dreaded Siberian Express, which has warmed from -40 degrees C to -38 degrees C Talk about change in extremes!

Expect to see an increasing volume of misleading climate hype over the coming year, to justify to the American people the destruction of their current way of energy life. For Mr. Gore, winning this argument is going to be a lot more difficult than winning the presidency in the year 2000.

Just for the sake of extremism, let's set the record straight. Studies indicate that agriculturally beneficial rains are increasing in the breadbasket of the world. The extreme cold temperatures of winter have moderated a bit (not enough, in my mind), while the extreme heat of summer hasn't changed in any detectable fashion. If this was caused by people, God Bless'em, we've got to write laws to stop it.

Patrick J. Michaels is professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a member of the Science and Environmental Policy Project.