It's snowing today where I live. What else is new? Concord, New Hampshire, Madison, Wisconsin, and points beyond have endured record snowfalls this winter. There's still nearly a month to go. Snow cover over the continent is the most expansive it has been in forty years. This doesn't surprise people who look out their window. It does surprise people who look to Al Gore.

The earth is not getting warmer. It's getting cooler. At least that's been the case for the last year, which has witnessed a most rapid cooling. "The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C--a value large enough to erase nearly all the global warming recorded over the past 100 years," reads a piece from the Daily Tech. "All in one year time. For all sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down."

The cause, say some scientists, is the sun. That doesn't surprise me. I'm not a scientist, but my stays at Holiday Inn Express qualify me to say that solar activity plays a greater role in climate than, say, gasoline or styrofoam cups. In other words, I think the sun is a more important variable in climate change than man. This was true when the mercury hit above-average temperatures and it is true now that the mercury is hitting below-average temperatures. Alas, the man-centered universe is as difficult a myth to overturn as the geocentric universe was.

Perhaps one year is too short a sampling to measure cooling. The same could be said about the thirty or so years of data proponents of man-made global warming are prone to rely upon. Taking the long view--55 million years long, to be exact--one can definitely say the earth is cooling. Back then, frogs, snakes, and other critters roamed within the Arctic Circle. Then an ice age hit.

"During the past billion years, the Earth's climate has fluctuated between warm periods--sometimes even completely ice-free--and cold periods, when glaciers scoured the continents," writes University of Maine geologist Kirk Maasch. "The cold periods--or ice ages--are times when the entire Earth experiences notably colder climatic conditions. During an ice age, the polar regions are cold, there are large differences in temperature from the equator to the pole, and large, continental-size glaciers can cover enormous regions of the earth." Do you notice what he's describing? He's saying we are living in an ice age, even if we are experiencing a warm respite.

"Between 52 and 57 million years ago, the Earth was relatively warm," Maasch notes. "Tropical conditions actually extended all the way into the mid-latitudes (around northern Spain or the central United States for example), polar regions experienced temperate climates, and the difference in temperature between the equator and pole was much smaller than it is today. Indeed it was so warm that trees grew in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and alligators lived in Ellesmere Island at 78 degrees North." Did SUVs cause all that?

The world doesn't revolve around people, as much as some people think it revolves around them. If it didn't happen today, if it didn't happen to them, it never happened. But climate change predates not only our existence, but the existence of all humans. The only constant with weather is change, which applies from day to day, season to season, and age to age.

Dan,
Your heliocentric nonsense could get you in hot water (heh) like it did Galileo.

The hysterical hoax perpetrated by Al Gore and all of the other newly minted ‘Green’ business moguls along with some in our government in the name of crowd control clearly demonstrates the lack of education and the willingness of the doom and gloom (nature good; people bad) crowd to follow what they perceive to be science.

In the Little Ice Age when there were fewer humans and virtually no fossil fuel use, there was an era of warming and then cooling between the 16th and mid 19th centuries. We are not even close to that kind of climate change now.

Leave it to self centered ego driven people to think that they have control over climate and the weather.