2008 -- the year that killed global warming?

Twentynine Palms, California, 2008

Here's a great piece from Christopher Booker in The Daily Telegraph.

"...First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century."

Not so fast, Mr. Smarty McLogic... Al Gore says global cooling is proof of global warming. As will be any future global tepidness, global chilliness or global nice-enough-for-short-pantsedness.

"...Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. ...

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess."

And yet, I have a feeling that won't stop us from trying anyway.

"As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" -- within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world."

Barack Obama is a Harvard professor and nonprofit lawyer who has never had a job in the private sector in his life. (Unless you count the one he brags about taking as an anti-corporate spy in his book.) It's safe to say any contact with the real world is going to be a "mighty jolt" for our next president.