Warming? Cooling? Whatever is convenient

The BBC News reports that not only has global warming disappeared to be replaced by global cooling, but that this cooling trend will continue for some time.

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

Why so truthful all of the sudden? It's hard to know the motive. Perhaps the bald-faced lies perpetuated by the rabid global-warming crowd were finally so obviously at odds with reality that cooler heads (pardon the pun) decided that if any vestige of the human-caused climate catastrophe crowd were to survive, it would have to be admitted that climate change was at very least not confined to warming trends and rising sea levels.

I personally am rather confused by the warming catastrophe crowd, considering some of them seemed to be convinced that by tomorrow morning the Atlantic might very well be lapping at our thresholds, while others were simultaneously predicting an apocalypse so slow in coming that we might well be living on other planets before it arrives.

Meanwhile, evidently it was getting colder all the time...
Now record cold temperatures are being seen all over.

We should note, however, that while climate change skeptics see this cooling as justification for their skepticism of inexorably rising global temperatures, true believers' faith in the heat death of the world by our own hands continues unabated:

In addition, say Met Office scientists, temperatures have never increased in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling.

What is crucial, they say, is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met office data, is clearly up.

Yes, thus spoke the oracle: Centuries-long ice ages may interfere, as in the past, but at some day in the hypothetical future, it will get hotter than it is now. Other scientists agree:

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.

But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

Notice the language here. Does anyone not realize that this has taken on all the artifices of a religious institution? Dr. Latif, worried that he might be perceived as a nonbeliever in Warming, clarifies that despite the scientific data stating otherwise, he is not a skeptic! Yes, we must have faith that the heat is coming. Ignore the cooling trend. Just believe. Sooner or later a heating trend will re-emerge, then we can start all this up again.

Meanwhile, the American people are less and less convinced; polls show that significantly fewer Americans are worried that Florida will go the way of the Siberian land bridge any time soon...

The new poll found that only 57 percent of Americans believe there is “solid evidence” for the existence of global warming, compared to 71 percent in April 2008.

Additionally, the poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is caused by human activity has dropped from 47 percent last year to 36 percent today.

One can only hope this means we'll hear less hysteria about carbon footprints and other such nonsense related to carbon dioxide levels, which have never been causally linked to warming anyway. But "Cap-and-Trade" is already here, and something tells me that more of the same taxes are coming whether facts or the American people back them up or not. It's not a question of reality or democracy anymore. As President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus (currently being sidelined in the EU for being a disagreeist) has pointed out, global climate change politics is just a power-play.

So should we sit idly by and watch our freedoms be taken for whatever trendy excuse the religio-scientific backers of the liberal pan-bureaucracy may contrive? We already have been. And that realization is by far the most frightening thing I'll encounter this halloween...

-()4|<.