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The Pentagon plans to have the first bombs available by December 2010, two years earlier than planned.

Wolf was practically breathless with excitement as he marveled there at the end about what a big, big, powerful bomb that is.  He looked like he was in need of CPR or some other type of relief.  "It's a huge, huge bomb, Barbara."

What possible reason could those crazy, irrational Iranians have for wanting to hide their nuclear facilities?  It's not like anyone's threatening them or anything.  And remember:  the proof that Iran is a unique, Nazi-like threat is that they allegedly have people in their government that threaten other countries with military attacks.  No responsible, civilized country would do that. 

Iran's evil intent is also demonstrated by their recent decision to allow IAEA inspectors to examine their Qom facility, which proved that there were no active centrifuges there, just as Iran said.  Truly peaceful countries would never allow such inspections.  So thankfully, we're about to have "a huge, huge bomb" -- bigger and better than all the ones we had before -- that can take care of the Iranian menace once and for all.

Last spring, we checked a similar claim made by the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank. The group claimed that there has been no net global warming for over a decade; we found that False because the climate scientists we spoke with said that, while temperatures have remained relatively static over the last decade, very little can be learned about climate change in a 10-year window.

Christopher Booker

But no matter how you slice the data, temperatures have indisputably fluctuated in the last decade, contrary to Matalin's suggestion that they have cooled. This graph from NASA shows that the temperature increased slightly between 2000 and 2001, dropped in 2002, and rose once again the following year. In this case, the annual mean temperature goes up and down, and the five-year mean is on a steady rise. This graph from NOAA shows a similar trend, with temperatures dipping slightly at the beginning of the decade and peaking once again in 2005.

At the most, it shows a plateau, he said. But certainly not a cooling trend.

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," he said. "Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

It's a point we heard repeatedly from the climate experts we interviewed. They all agreed that, while climate temperatures may dip from year to year, it's short-sighted to say changes within a decade mean that climate change is going away.

"If you just take a one-year comparison -- say that it's cooler in 2008 than it was in 2007 -- that's an improper use of statistics" to make judgments about climate change, said John Reilly, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It still remains much warmer than it was in the 1960s. To the extent that there has been some slight cooling, we still remain half-a-degree above what it was then."

Indeed, climate records show that temperatures have been on the rise since the middle of the century, and that fluctuations between recent years are relatively small compared to overall increase. NASA estimates that global temperatures have risen a total of 2.3 degrees since 1895, and that 13 of the warmest years since 1850 have occurred in the last 14 years.

Jim Hurrell, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., says these natural temperature variations are expected.

"In the same way that El Nino made 1998 warm, in 2007 and 2008, La Nina made global temperatures a bit cooler than they have been running, but still much warmer than the long-term average," Hurrell said referring to El Nino's cooler counterpart.