No...neither can I.
Yet, supporting the view that foreign press outlets are more willing to present both sides of this debate, the British Telegraph published a piece Saturday most climate alarmists on this side of the Atlantic would never dare:
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. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
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.
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.
Early on, the author pointed out the absurdity of press outlets in May predicting climate change would destroy the winter sports industry, in particular Alpine skiing; seven months later, "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation."
This is especially ironic given an article published in Wednesday's Rocky Mountain News:
Colorado’s ski areas will have to carve runs higher up the mountains and triple their snowmaking if they are to co-exist with global warming over the coming decades, a new study says.
That extra snowmaking will require a lot more water at a time when it is very expensive to buy senior water rights, says the study presented today to the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. And it would have to come from a distance away, because any diversion close by would harm wildlife habitats.
Gondolas will have to be revamped — to take skiers from skimpy snow at the bottom of the mountain high up to where there is a permanent snowpack.
The following was reported the same day by Julie Rust, the director of Vail, Colorado's, ski patrol:
As of this morning, we have had 148 inches of cumulative snowfall, 98 inches just this month! Vail is seeing the best December snow in 8 years. This is good stuff!
This was the Local's Lowdown from Aspen Friday:
This has to be the best Christmas skiing week I can recall in my 15 year tenure in Aspen. Earlier this week we had a very healthy dumping of snow and my legs are still suffering for it. Knee to thigh deep snow on top of the mountains. You had to find the steepest pitches just to get enough speed to go down.
In fact, conditions look pretty spectacular for this early in the season all over Colorado according to that state's official ski report website.
Ain't it delicious?
