Some people think that a couple big snowstorms (the snow from which is melting as I write this) in December and January are enough to suggest that global warming is not happening.

Jeff Jacoby thinks claims, in an article called "Br-r-r! Where did global warming go?" that 8 years in which the average global climate did not differ significantly from that of the hottest year on record suggests that very soon there will be a period of global cooling (and merits an article title implying that it's really, really cold). (Ironically, I got the info about the average global climate of the last 8 years from an article called "There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998".)

1998 was the all-time high for average global temperature. The hottest ever since we started measuring such things. All the years since have not been significantly colder. This is supposed to be evidence against global warming? Is that really the best that climate change skeptics can do?

In the same article, there are quotes from and links to some questionable science:

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

This could be the fault of poor wording/faulty translation, but Sorokhtin's quote, as written, indicates that he either thinks that people are claiming that the energy itself used by humans--rather than the carbon dioxide by-product--is what people hold responsible for global warming, doesn't know the difference between carbon dioxide and energy, or wants us to think that he means "carbon dioxide" and not "energy" so that he can make a statement that's technically not a lie but which is a non-sequitur, but sounds like a convincing argument against global warming.

The Dutch paper is a reply to another paper that says that the link between the climate and the solar cycle ended about 20 years ago. Their paper claims that although the surface temperature (the temperature reading used in the original study) is not linked to the solar cycle, the tropospheric air temperature and sub-surface ocean temperature still are. And then, because these temperature readings give them the link they're looking for and surface air temperatures don't, they believe they've found sufficient reason to reject surface air temperatures as a measure of the earth's climate.

When the response of the climate system to the solar cycle is apparent in the troposphere and ocean, but not in the global surface temperature, one can only wonder about the quality of the surface temperature record. For whatever reason, it is a poor guide to Sun-driven physical processes that are still plainly persistent in the climate system.

Isn't that called "cherry-picking data to find the result you're looking for"? I think I've also heard a saying something like, if you do a study looking for a result, you'll probably find it. I'm admittedly not a climate scientist, but I wonder why we would be more concerned with the troposphere and submarine temperatures than the temperatures in the part of the earth where we actually live. Maybe there's a reason why troposphere and ocean temperatures are less sensitive to the greenhouse effect and more sensitive to solar activity cycles than surface air temperatures, but I don't want to live under the sea--which is where some people's homes will end up if global warming continues.