The Earth’s temperature never stands still. Even when there is no discernible “trend” in the global thermometer, ocean and surface temperatures fluctuate to some minor degree on a year-to-year basis. And when there are trends, as the centuries-long Roman Warming of 200 BC to 600 AD, the last place to look for causation is human activity. The first is to the source of heat in our planetary system: the Sun. A number of scientists contend that decreased solar activity caused all, or nearly all, of 2007’s dramatic drop in global temperatures; down point-65 to point-75 of a degree Celsius. Put another way, last year’s steep drop in overall planetary warmth, confirmed by all four major global tracking outlets, was enough to wipe out a century of gradual warming all by itself. And it came at the end of a cooling trend that began in 1998.

The next place to search for the reasons behind global temperature change is to the huge heating and cooling system that covers two-thirds of our planet: the sea. Climate researchers are telling us to expect another decade of cooler temperatures, because of a cyclical shift in the Gulf Stream, which ordinarily carries warm surface water from the tropical to the northern Atlantic Ocean. So, what do you suppose the overall effect will be if the decreased solar activity continues and you throw in the Gulf Stream cooling on top of it? Global warming will have an awful lot of catching up to do starting in, say, 2020.

Still, scientists and organizations who have staked their credibility - and are willing that the rest of us should stake our economic well-being - on the concept of human-driven global warming will not back down. They claim to have been warning us for some time now that global warming will not be gradual, but will occur in starts and stops. So the next ten years, and the last ten, too, I can only surmise, are viewed by them as one of the stops…a stutter-step, if you will, on the path to a warmer earth. They base this largely on concentrations of carbon dioxide - a primary greenhouse gas - in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Well, whether those concentrations are caused by human activity or not, and there’s plenty of scientific disagreement about that, maybe we should be grateful for them. Another couple of years like 2007, and we’ll be back to talking about global cooling, as we were three decades ago. The ’greenhouse effect’, the blanket of gases in our atmosphere that traps heat from the sun, is what makes it possible to live on this planet.

Which brings us to the third place to look for the causes of global temperature trends - the atmosphere itself. Thinning or thickening of the atmospheric layers that keep our planet warm, and which, as in the case of ozone, can result from the interaction of solar rays with certain molecules, would have a dramatic effect on planetary thermometer read-outs. Plus, if you really want to make the case for the Sun’s role in all this, you need only make reference to the fact that warming on other planets in our solar system seems to have been on a pace with our own. Last I knew of it, there were no power plants on Saturn. And I’m not even mentioning the effect of volcanic and other natural events on the atmosphere.

The point I’m coming to is this: among most environmentalists, the concept of human-driven global warming has become an article of religious faith: part of a new catechism in which the argument is repeated so often and at such length that it becomes impervious to empirical observation. ‘Yes, we’ve been cooling off for nearly ten years now and yes, we expect at least another decade of cooling. But we still insist that global warming is real, that it’s being driven by human industry, and that we should all sign the economically-devastating ‘Kyoto Accords’.’ That sort of immunity to facts looks more like obsession than conviction.

Look, if the notion that human beings are bringing on a climatologic disaster is the primary concept that informs your world-view, then it will act as a self-blinding lens, filtering out all data to the contrary. If things continue as they have been and happen as predicted, in ten years we may very well be looking at an approximately 150 year low in global temperatures. The impact of that, in expanding polar ice sheets, lower ocean levels, and tremendous hardship for agriculture, is hard to predict. Go ahead and plug the information into your computers and see what they project. Ten years from now, we may be encouraging greenhouse gas production, for the mere sake of warmth.  Source

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