Kiss the heat good-bye

Talk about your winters of discontent. Turns out that the winter that has less than a month yet to run is a defiant one, not willing to bow down to the conventional wisdom of global warming and perfectly happy to keep mankind shivering away and hoping for a spring that just won’t come home. Weather ain’t climate, say the acolytes of the High Church of the Overheated Globe, so pay no attention to the fact that in Colorado’s banana belt — the Grand Valley — the bananas are growing fur, the better to fend off the snow and cold. Now this isn’t the first time Colorado has been subjected to cold. It was just last year that Denver residents were moaning, as only Denver residents can, about 61 straight days of snow cover. Warming acolytes argue that it wasn’t a record — the record is 63 days of snow cover — and that weather isn’t climate. So, go pound snow. Of course, weather was climate when Frenchmen were complaining that their ski slopes were shrinking. Powderhorn’s future as a ski resort was said to be as bleak as the chances of a Maori bobsled team. Powderhorn somehow is still in business, though. Granted, no immediate word on the prospects of Rockies-bound bobsledders from the Indian Ocean. Other reports, however, are trickling in from around the globe. Snow fell in Baghdad and Jerusalem this winter. Draw your own conclusions about whether certain people are being advised to chill out. Snow fell as well in Buenos Aires, as well as Johannesburg, South Africa. Not even the Chinese were spared the cold. Some cities went weeks without power because power lines toppled and the weather made it too cold to repair them. More recently, the U.S. National Climatic Data Center reported the average temperature in January was one-third of a degree Fahrenheit cooler than the 20th century average. In fact, four major global-temperature tracking outfits, including that of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, all noted a precipitous drop in global temperatures. Baby, it’s cold outside, and all the more so because the alarmists were telling us we were out of time. Humanity was going to be buried; we were going to be roasted in a planetary super sauna. Humans like heat. What’s called the Medieval Climate Optimum coincided with a rapid increase in the human population and is connected to a flowering of accomplishment in the arts and sciences. Earth’s chill is not the result of Al Gore staying home, polishing his Oscar. The fact is the sun is entering a cooler phase, and as the only source of heat for the solar system, when the sun cools, everybody cools. By some reckonings, the sun at the end of our 20th century was at its most active, and hottest, over the previous 8,000 years. Some researchers have gone so far as to predict the return of the Ice Age. Still, there’s nothing like a cold slap in the face to recognize the kind of demagoguery that’s so far characterized the so-called science of global warming.