But it's a cold warm...

When I lived in the southwest, people used to joke "it's a dry heat." Then I moved to Alaska, where the version was "it's a dry cold." I guess for the Global Warming obsessed, this year proves the calamity is "a cold warm:"

Al Gore says global warming is a planetary emergency. It is difficult to see how this can be so when record low temperatures are being set all over the world. In 2007, hundreds of people died, not from global warming, but from cold weather hazards.

Carbon dioxide continues to build in the atmosphere, but the mean planetary temperature hasn't increased significantly for nearly nine years. Antarctica is getting colder. Neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased. The 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966. In 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S.

Unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007. Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered.

The Canadian government warns that this winter is likely to be the coldest in 15 years.

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you're hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming. I can't make this stuff up. Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.

Or, dare I say it, an alternate religion? A little humility towards what we actually understand about the thermal variations of our planet would seem to be in order. There are plenty of "experts" reaching different conclusions. As I've said before, weaning ourselves from fossil fuels is a good thing, global warming or not. But let's not say there's conclusive proof of a global warming crisis when evidence to the contrary is as close as the cold nose on your face.