The U.K. Daily Mail posted a story yesterday with two amazing pictures:

As much as I love the idea of global warming, the pictures seem to indicate that it is just not happening. I would like to point out that in the past we have had cycles of both global warming and global cooling. These cycles occurred long before the industrial revolution and were not related to anyone’s carbon footprint.

The article reports:

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The article concludes:

‘The IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’

Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.

Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.

Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.

The bottom line here is that we simply don’t understand the earth’s climate cycles. We know they exist, but we don’t know how they work or if human activity impacts them. I am in favor of clean water and clean air, but I am not in favor of crippling economic growth for faulty science. We need to learn balance, and we need to realize that much of the panic we have heard regarding global warming has to do with the desire on the part of some world leaders to transfer wealth from successful free countries into the hands of third-world tyrants. The route to economic success for any third-world country has to include freedom for its people. If there is no incentive, there will be no economic growth.