Once more the Climate Change True Believers - acolytes all of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming - are left scratching their collective heads wondering why the false god of their false religion failed to deliver the goods according the Apocalypse of St. Albert, which reads “Know ye that the earth shall continue to warm in response to our carbon sins.”

Climatologists are bewildered because global warming appears to be at a dead standstill - in spite of the fact that China is firing up a new coal burning power plant every couple of weeks and burns more coal every year than the U.S., all of Europe and Japan combined, making it the world’s most ravenous consumer of coal and one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide. To make matters worse - for the Climate Change crowd, that is - India is snapping at China’s heels in the race to build coal-fired power plants.

Yet, there it is in all its undisputed glory: the planet has not experienced any significant global warming in a decade and appears poised to enter a cooling phase.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

“Billions of euros are at stake.” Ah, follow the money trail and you will always find your answer. The euros in question represent more money picked from the pockets of gullible Euroweenies who happily play sheep to the wolves in woolen suits who fleece them.

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Indeed. Facts are stubborn things, aren’t they? I suspect the reporter made a typographical error with the 0.7 degree figure. According to the UN, the total temperature increase was 0.2 degrees and even this, as we shall see below, has been contradicted.

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

What nonsense. Any credible scientist - if he is true to the scientific method of investigation - would rightly be ashamed to present as evidence for proof of a hypothesis ANY data on which serious doubt has been cast. In this case, the new data call into question the accuracy and hence the predictive value of computer models. But even without this new data, many in the scientific community were already questioning the accuracy of climate models because none of them could account for the effect of cloud formations on the interaction of the sun and the surface of our planet.

Moreover, it begs the question to assert that the current stagnation in temperature rise will have no long term effect on global warming. The fact is that we really do not know with any empirical certainty as there is no way to accurately gauge that kind of forecast.

Just a few weeks ago, Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius — in other words, a standstill.

In other words, at a time in our industrial history when more nations than ever before are jacking up their output of carbon emissions, global temperatures not only have NOT risen, but now appear to be on the verge of falling. How can this be? According to Pope Albert’s prophecy - pronounced in 2005 -  unless sweeping and far reaching changes are made (i.e., he is placed in control of all the industrial economies of the world) the planet will become a sweltering hothouse with much of its land mass underwater by the year 2015.

At this time we are on the cusp of the mid-point of his prophesied descent into hell -  when up and coming industrialized nations such as China and India are belching more carbon into the atmosphere with each passing month. Far from from heeding Pope Albert’s prophecy of doom, the world seems to have ignored it completely. Kyoto was a flop. Copenhagen has already been declared DOA.  By this point in time, temperatures should have been increasing steadily, ice caps melting, oceans rising, hurricanes multiplying like rabbits and increasing in strength. Has any of this happened?

Um…..no. The average global temperature has remained steady for the past decade and appears poised to begin a decline.

As for the ice caps melting and oceans rising, Chrisopher Monckton summed it up perfectly:

First, the Greenland ice sheet thickened by 2 inches per year in the decade from1993 to 2003 (Johannesen et al., 2005).

Secondly, Antarctica has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002), so there is little danger of a sudden disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet through “global warming”, since the main influence on it is regional cooling.

Thirdly, the main source of sea-level rise, now that the vast land-based ice sheets that existed in the last Ice Age have almost gone, is not ice-melt but thermosteric expansion, of which Gore appears not to have heard.

However, thermosteric expansion can only occur if the oceans are warming, which they are not (Lyman et al., 2006). Nor are they likely to warm, because globally the atmosphere is cooling, and the oceans take their heat chiefly from the atmosphere.

Hurricanes? Heh…only nine major tropical storms formed this year and of those, only three became hurricanes - not one of which had enough energy to reach the U.S. as anything more than a tropical storm.

The True Believers are undaunted. After all, they have faith in the inherent truth of AGW - facts and reality be damned. Faith, after all, is belief in the evidence of things not seen.

For his part, Pope Albert likewise has faith - in the gullibility of his followers and the complicity of equally greedy politicians anxious for a slice of the carbon credit pie.

While I dread the impact on our economically ravaged nation of what is anticipated to be one of the most brutally cold winters in recent memory, I can take some chilly comfort and icy satisfaction in the knowledge that shivering Americans in areas of the country that otherwise shouldn’t be shivering will be less inclined than ever before to give Al Gore the benefit of the doubt.

And now for the compare and contrast portion of today’s AGW post which I like to call “Name the Homeowner”:

House #1:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every ‘green’ feature current home construction can provide. The house has 4 bedrooms and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet holds geothermal heat pumps circulating water through pipes sunk 300 feet deep. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. The system uses one-quarter of the electricity used by a conventional system. Rainwater is collected in a 25,000-gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks, then into the cistern, from which the garden is irrigated.

House #2:

A 20-room mansion with 8 bathrooms, a pool and poolhouse, and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs to over $2,400. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in the Northern or Midwestern snow-belt. It’s in the South.

House #1 is located in Crawford, Texas and is owned by former President George W. Bush.

House #2 is located in Carthage, Tennessee and is owned by former Vice-President (and currently the world’s premier psychotic Prophet of Global Doom) Al Gore.