Mark down the week of September 20, 2009 as the period when global warming skepticism kicked into high gear. Yes, there had been a lot of skepticism earlier but this was the week when doubt about the "inevitability" of global warming broke into the mainstream media in a significant way.

In the not so humble opinion of your humble correspondent it began last Sunday when I took the American MSM to task here in NewsBusters for failing to report on the observation by a noted climatologist, Professor Mojib Latif, of Germany's Leibniz Institute, that the planet is in for a cooling period that could last from 10 to 20 years. The very next day, by an amazing "coincidence," the findings of Professor Latif were reported by Andrew Revkin of the New York Times. Although Revkin couldn't quite bring himself to renounce the global warming faith in which he invested a couple of decades of his life, the mere mention of Latif's findings caused him to be charged with heresy from the usual leftwing suspects including the Daily Kos. Here are a couple of  examples of Kossack invective  hurled at Revkin for daring to question in even a small way the sacred global warming dogma:

The lede of Revkin's article is shocking. It's wrong. And, given the UN meeting this week on climate change such nonsense should not have been published by the Times for the policy makers to read.

 another inexcusable blunder from the NYT. 

Unfortunately for the Kossacks and the rest of the left, the cat is now out of the bag about Professor Latif's findings. Kyle Wingfield of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted yesterday that the Facts are cooling off global alarmism:

Global temperatures have held steady for several years, contrary to the expectations of statistical models. This month, a leading German user of these climate models predicted temperatures would fall for “one or two decades” to come.

Why the reprieve? The German, Mojib Latif, cited changing currents in the northern Atlantic Ocean. He even went a step further, saying the currents were also responsible for an unknown portion of the warming in the late 20th century.

...The German seriously undercut the idea that global warming will continue unabated as long as emissions of carbon dioxide rise, a cherished claim of climate alarmists. Nature, he acknowledged, can overwhelm or amplify whatever heating effect CO2 has. We’re still learning how.

Sean Hannity also weighed in this week on the impact of Professor Latif on the global warming debate:

The Meltdown segment is brought to you by prominent meteorologist Mojib Latif. Latif is an author of the reports produced by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which liberals cite reverently to prove all sorts of theories about global warming.

Latif now predicts that we're in for a long period of steady temperatures and maybe even some global cooling. At a U.N. conference last week, he told over 1,500 scientists, "The strong warming effect that we experienced during the last decades will be interrupted. Temperatures will be more or less steady for some years and thereafter will pick up again and continue to warm."

Now that the expert has spoken, I wonder if the global warming alarmists will change their tune?

Finally, James Delingpole of the UK Telegraph gives such credit to Professor Latif that he thinks that the global warming alarmists might not be able to recover from his observations:

...the science has turned viciously against the warmists. Not that it wasn’t against them before.  But they have their work seriously cut out if they’re ever going to recover from the speech given at the UN world climate conference in Geneva last week by Professor Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz institute.

At the very least let us hope, as the walls of the global warming dogma begin to crumble, that the ManBearPig believers quit making the absurd claim that the scientific community is unanimous in supporting the notion that the planet is heating up to dangerous levels. Are you listening, Al Gore?

—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.