It's not often that meteorology intersects with geopolitics - but Europe could be in store for another Cold War, literally.

Accuweather.com's chief long-range and hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi observed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's recent cut of gas flows to Europe via Ukraine may have been done so in anticipation of a global cooling cycle on the Jan. 6 "Glenn Beck Show" radio program. Bastardi has a solid reputation among Wall Street traders for understanding weather's impact on energy commodities.

"The thing I want to bring up here - very interesting - most of the solar cycle studies that we know about and that guys like me read have come out of the Russian scientists," Bastardi said. "But when Glasnost developed, the Russian scientists, a lot of their ideas on the coming cool period that a lot of us believe is going to occur - ice, rather than fire is the big problem down the road here 2030, 2040, and the reversing cyclical cycles of the ocean - it came out of the East."

Although Joe Bastardi is likely not a household name, most Americans probably know his face as one of the meteorologists interviewed whenever a serious climate event like a hurricane hits the mainland.

Despite such regular airtime, the senior AccuWeather.com meteorologist's open letter to presidential candidates concerning anthropogenic global warming will likely be thoroughly ignored by media far more interested in spreading the unproven junk science of Nobel Laureate Al Gore than advancing the discussion concerning this controversial issue.

This is especially true given Bastardi's suggestion that Obama "can [Gore] as an advisor on the environment."

Since green press members are almost guaranteed to boycott Bastardi's marvelous plea for some climate sanity, here are the highlights of his letter published Monday (emphasis added):

History seemed to repeat itself on Monday's World News with Charles Gibson, as substitute anchor Dan Harris introduced a story, filed by ABC correspondent John Berman, which highlighted the view of "some scientists" that global warming is responsible for an increase in the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes in recent decades. Not only did the same Harris/Berman team file a similar story over two years ago on the July 9, 2005 show, then known as World News Tonight, but Monday's report also recycled soundbites of two scientists from the earlier story. Berman, from Monday September 3: "Across the globe, the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled over the past 30 years.

On the Tuesday August 21 The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, AccuWeather senior meteorologist Joe Bastardi poured water on claims that a global warming trend has been the cause of hurricanes of increased intensity as he contended that the Northern Hemisphere similarly saw periods of increased hurricane activity in past decades, going back to the 1890s. Bastardi: "We're back in the '30's, '40's and 50's. This back and forth cycle that occurs, we saw it in the 1890s to 1910. ... And people are just getting carried away and fascinated when, if they go back and look at what happened before, you can see the similarities." (Transcript follows)