The latest on climate data

Break out the fur coats, kids, the world's getting colder... or as Lorne Gunter puts it "Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof".

Global Warming Strikes Out Again

Yep, it's official: I'm a Global Warming Denier.

And, as usual, the science remains on my side.

Two stories to get us riled up this time. The first is last year's temperature data, which shows a global cooling in 2007 mean temps of between 0.65 and 0.75 Celsius degrees. (Graph above).

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Then there's the Canadian National Post story which basically refutes everything Al Gore has ever said - the Arctic Ice is growing, and is now between 10cm and 20cm thicker on average than it was one year ago. Money quote:

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

Can someone please get this information into the hands of John McCain, quick? This thoroughly discredits the need for a "cap-and-trade" system, which just begs for socialist control of energy resources and a prolonging and worsening of global poverty. If Johnny Mac can use this data to reverse course on the issue, it can be used very effectively against the liberals in the Fall campaign.

Not that he'd ever listen to me, but maybe he'd listen to the data. We all should start paying attention to good scientific data, and not the hyperventilating alarmism of the environmental left.