John Coleman, the founder of American TV’s Weather Channel, has challenged Al Gore’s dire predictions that the planet is in peril because of global warming.

In a speech to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, Coleman said, “There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.”

He said for the past ten thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period, which might well be called nature’s global warming because the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes.

“Mr Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming. Well, it is simply not happening,” Coleman added.

Decline: Coleman said there was a significant natural warming trend worldwide in the 1980s and 1990s as a solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer sunspots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline.

The Earth has cooled for almost 10 straight years. “So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?” he said. The cooling trend, he claimed, is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it.

He said he had dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including UN reports and the bottom line was: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. There is no other issue.

He said the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings are flawed, as is their science. The hypothesis is wrong and the data is manipulated.

The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming. It is a natural component of the Earth’s atmosphere and has been there since time began, absorbed and emitted by the oceans and used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis.