"When the sun is slightly brighter, meaning giving more light to Earth's system, the temperature warms in the Arctic," said Soon. "With the cooling that we observed in the Arctic from the 1940s to the 1970s, guess what the sun is doing? It's actually dimming slightly, ever so slightly. And then, guess what happened after the late 1970s? The sun brightens again."

(h/t to Dan Anderson) We hate to rain on the parade of the true believers in global warming. So we will leave that up to Phil Chapman (pictured), the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut.

Chapman, a geophysicist now living in San Francisco, says in The Australian it is time to prepare ourselves for the possibility of global cooling and another little ice age.

Chapman says the Earth's average temperature has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade -- and that all four tracking agencies report it "cooled by about 0.7C in 2007." That, he says, is the "fastest temperature change in the instrumental record."

The Real Climate Martians

Fred Singer, one of the world’s renowned scientists, believes in Martians. I discovered this several weeks ago while reading his biography on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. “Do you really believe in Martians?” I asked him last week, at a chance meeting at a Washington event. The answer was “No.”

Wikipedia’s error was neither isolated nor inadvertent. The page that Wikipedia devotes to what is ostensibly Fred Singer’s biography is designed to trivialize his long and outstanding scientific career by painting him as a political partisan and someone who “is best known as president and founder (in 1990) of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, which disputes the prevailing scientific views of climate change, ozone depletion, and second-hand smoke and is science advisor to the conservative journal NewsMax.”

Innocent Wikipedia readers would be surprised to learn that Dr. Singer is no conservative kook but the first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Center; the recipient of a White House commendation for his early design of space satellites; the recipient of a commendation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for research on particle clouds; and the recipient of  a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for the development and management of weather satellites.

Just as Al Gore did not invent the Internet, he did not invent global warming theory. Scientists invented it, and they continue to fuel the mass hysteria they created by making predictions about climate change and its dire consequences for our planet. But have any of their followers stopped to consider how scientists are able to predict a global catastrophe in the distant future without being able to make accurate short-term predictions?

For the last two years, scientists were predicting high hurricane activity in the United States. Yet, according to David Demming, writing in the Washington Times last year, "...neither the intensity nor the frequency of hurricanes has increased." The article points out that "the 2007 season was the third-quietest since 1966," and that "in 2006 not a single hurricane made landfall in the U.S."

The polar bear is in trouble in Canada because of overhunting and global warming, but it is not endangered or threatened with extinction, an independent committee advising the Canadian government said Friday.

The committee gave the fabled Arctic animals the weakest classification, that of "special concern," but the Canadian government would nonetheless have to develop a management plan to protect them if it agrees with the new label.

"Based on the best available information at hand, there was insufficient reason to think that the polar bear was at imminent risk of extinction," said Jeffrey Hutchings, chairman of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada.

A remarkable thing happened Thursday: a press member wanted to ask Nobel Laureate Al Gore about the growing international food crisis and how it relates to ethanol and global warming hysteria.

Not surprisingly, the man who cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate fourteen years ago mandating the use of ethanol wasn't available, and a spokesman for his hysteria-driving Alliance for Climate Protection declined to comment.

Isn't that convenient?

Regardless, the good news is that press outlets continue to recognize this unholy connection, and that someone, even at the conservative New York Sun, would deign to report it (emphasis added throughout):

Until last week, I still had hope. I still believed, perhaps naively, that the majority of Americans were wise enough to see the truth.

Perhaps they are, but given the onslaught of political correctness now surrounding the topic, I seriously doubt it. I think we have lost the battle. The issue is global warming, now cleverly called “climate change” by those who seek to explain away those pesky unseasonable drops in temperature that contradict the idea of “warming.”

The reason for my despair is two-fold. First, a page caught my eye in my latest issue of World Magazine.

A growing contingent of scientists has been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.

Conversely, radical increases in global temperatures or rising sea levels proclaimed by Al Gore and his ilk aren't facts. They're merely guesses, some of them hysterical, about conditions decades or centuries into the future and based on assumptions about innumerable variables, many of which are beyond our scientific comprehension and expertise.