There Is No Global Warming

....But if actual scientists (as opposed to left-wing idealogues and political hacks) are correct, it may not be long before we fervently wish there was:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in fifty years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C - a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Well, what you know about that?  If modern Western capitalist civilization is being so ecologically irresponsible, pumping unGaia-ly quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and otherwise "destroying the planet," which is leading inevitably to planetary climatological catastrophe, just how is it that even the meager evidence of an increase in average global temperature that has accumulated over the past few decades can be wiped out in a single year, and without the enactment and ratification of the Kyoto Protocol or any other poverty-exploding, economy-destroying, wealth-pilfering international "climate change" agreement?  Hmmm?

Of course, if Al Gore had succeeded in stealing the 2000 presidential election and pushing Kyoto to ratification, he would be crediting to his "baby" this sudden drop in global temperatures.

And he'd still be full of bleep, because the factor driving this flip-flop to global cooling is a lot more pertinent than any human activity - and is even more massive than Fat Albert himself:

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which....is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just twelve months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

We better darned well be hoping and praying that CO2 is acting to warm the planet if we're headed for a period of reduced solar energy output.  And here's why:

Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

That's the thing that has always struck me about the global warming crowd - they always speak of a rise in global temperatures as though the consequences will be irreduceably negative.  As more and more holes have been poked in their climatological doomsday insistances, they've simply ascribed each one of them - more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, droughts, floods, el nino's, el nina's, mild winters, severe winters, tornados, smog, the heartbreak of psoriasis, rampant bellybutton lint - as another consequence of global warming.  The shrieking of global warming being the universal apocalypse is not borne out by past such instances in recorded history, particularly the period before the Noahic Deluge, in which life was more abundant, physically larger, and human beings were much longer lived than we are today.

Facts can sometimes be so....inconvenient, can't they?

Given the choice between warmer weather and colder weather, I vote for warmth.  Just as I will always choose modernity and prosperity over squallorous primitivism borne of pagan superstition.

Time to expand that carbon footprint, and ramp up those smokestacks, tailpipes, cow intestines, election year campaign stump speeches, revised and extended congressional remarks, and every other source of greenhouse emissions.  If Sol is about ready to take a stellar nap, we're going to need to trap all the heat we can get.