There’s been a bumper crop of bad news flowing for the global warming alarmists.

As already noted, the theory of man-made global warming is on the wane. As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

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.

One’s really got to wonder how Al Gore is taking the news. It’s difficult to work people into a panic when they’re being blasted by snow. And there are many examples.

According to NASA, ocean temps have been dropping since 2003. Of course, there’s the alarmist spin: “Melting arctic ice is responsible for the cooling of the oceans.” But that’s a stretch at best when you consider …

Arctic ice has grown to the same level as when scientists began measuring the ice caps. Wait a minute. Noah Wyle’s been telling us that polar bears are dying because there’s no more ice.

Perhaps most interesting about that little nugget is that we’ve only been keeping track of ice levels for 31 years — yet an entire segment of science, draconian regulations and public opinion have been founded on that data.

And then there’s this, from Pravda of all places:

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

That suggests that global warming is, in fact, not man-made and more the result of natural occurances — such as weather cycles and variations in solar energy. According the NASA scientists:

From the 1980s to 1990s his team noticed increased amounts net energy when comparing incoming solar energy to what Earth radiates and reflects. Since then, the solar flux has remained the same. Other studies have suggested that the sun’s output has decreased in the past few years.

Back to Booker’s piece:

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Well, yeah. It’s difficult to keep up the facade of man-made global warming when study after study suggests the theory is baseless. What’s more, people are waking up. According a Rasmussen poll released Jan. 19:

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity.

Seven percent (7%) attribute global warming to some other reason, and nine percent (9%) are unsure in a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

So will the politicians listen? Probably not. There’s too much money and power wrapped up into the so-called solutions to the problem. As a noted man-made -global-warming-believing scientist told New Scientist yesterday:

Most of the “green” stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people …

And watch how much of the global warming nonesense is dominating the ridiculous economic recovery plans in the U.S.

However, as Booker notes, economics might bring our leaders to the table.

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. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

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.

It would be better if the schemes became less appealing because they aren’t based on fact, but economics will do.