The Gloat of the Week: I Mean Quote of the Week !

Those, like me, who dare assert the Earth's temperature isn't on a perilous rise are derided as ''deniers''.  For the cultural elitists that make up the majority of the delusional and anti-human environmentalist organizations, the climate debate has ended, and it is an unquestionable article of faith that mankind's carbon-dioxide emissions have set the stage for rising oceans, devastating hurricanes and disasters on a scale never before seen.

Now....last week a paper published by no less an authority than NASA scientist James E. Hansen (see photo) with a remarkable admission in it. It is titled Global Temperature Update Through 2012.  Here is the money quote, which pretty much ends the caterwauling from naysayers about global temperature being stalled for the last decade and a half. ''The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.''  Gosh, I thought Hansen had claimed that ''climate forcings'' had overwhelmed natural variability?

Mr Hansen is the intellectual Godfather of the global-warming movement, who advised Al Gore on his climate-scare flick, ''An Inconvenient Truth'',  on which he won his ill-gotten Oscar. Mr Hansen has just acknowledged more than a lack of warming. His words confirm nature, not mankind, played the decisive role in directing global temperatures over the past 16 years. In his 2003 paper called Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb? in which he stressed that human-caused forcings on the climate are now greater than natural ones, and that this can cause large climate changes. Well....according to Hansen's latest essay, apparently not. So much for ''da bomb''.

The anecdotal evidence has certainly not been friendly to climate hysteria. Southern England is covered in heavy snow. Los Angeles has been shivering under a real ''cold snap. Frigid temperatures in January aren't unusual, but the global warming fanatics have been trying to pass off today's climate as worse than the droughts and heat waves seen in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s when even the Arctic Ocean melted as it has now. There's another interesting excerpt where Hansen's essay states: The approximate stand-still of global temperatures during 1935-1975 is generally attributed to an approximate balance of aerosol cooling and greenhouse gas warming during a period of rapid growth of fossil fuel use with little control on particulate air pollution, but quantitative interpretation has been impossible because of the absence of adequate aerosol measurements.''

That paragraph about 1935-1975 is telling, given that we now have a cleaner atmosphere, and less aerosols to reflect sunlight, it goes without saying that more sunlight now reaches the surface. Since GISS (satellite) is all about reading the surface temperature, that suggests (to rational thinkers) that some portion of the surface temperature rise post 1975 is due to pollution controls being enacted.  He and his ilk still can't accept the non-linkage of CO2 and the Earth warming up  But, of course....he's still arguing for an imbalance, even though flatness abounds. Seems like equilibrium to me.

The Way I See It....the leftists and eco-facists aren't about to give-up on global warming even with the writing (in Bold Letters) on the wall. Politicians need the scare to have leverage to raise taxes through ''cap and trade'' schemes and to regulate what types of light bulbs the public will be allowed to buy. It would be economic suicide for climate soothsayers to entirely drop their frightening prognostications because that is the source for billions of dollars in taxpayer funding.

That's why Mr Hansen's paper, so not to look like a total Smuck, insists the ''stand-still of global temperatures'' is a short-term phenomenon within a long-term trend. Those little carbon dioxide molecules, that are the byproduct of economic progress, are still setting the stage for the end-of-days. The apocalypse is just on holiday for a while.  But after being ridiculed by the climate-change establishment, it's nice to know us climate realists were right all along.