Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe writes this piece, Br-r-r! Where did the global warming go?

THE STARK headline appeared just over a year ago. «2007 to be 'warmest on record,' » BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government's Meteorological Office, the story announced that «the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,» surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

The piece chronicles the cold weather happening throughout the world and country in 2007 and, I might add, the winter here in Missoula certainly is colder then it has been in several years.

He also points out that there are scientists out there who do not agree with the conventional wisdom of human caused global warming and that we may be entering a period of global cooling. He and many other scientists believe that solar activity are the actual causes of climate change. I know it's crazy to imagine the sun as causing the earth's warming and cooling. How can we tax that??

«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.

I've been consistent in saying the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years and we are just simply experiencing that natural phenomenon. Right now we've been in a warming period and next we will be in a cooling period. The real problem we face is the Left's efforts to reduce C02 will increase human suffering through seriously stifling economic activity.

Yet so relentlessly has the alarmist scenario been hyped, and so disdainfully have dissenting views been dismissed, that millions of people assume Gore must be right when he insists: «The debate in the scientific community is over.»

But it isn't. Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, «the current US approach of CO{-2} reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.»

Climate science isn't a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming - especially if what's coming is a global Big Chill.