Considering global temperatures have been falling for a decade and there is more and more evidence that the sun may play a larger role than humans in climate change, and considering more people now believe that humans are not the main cause of climate change, it's clear that a concerted push-back from global warming advocates had to occur if there was to be any hope for President Obama's cap-and-trade proposal. Without a convincing case being made for global warming it would be impossible to implement such proposals.

Today we have an article that tries to make the case that global warming is not dead even though the planet has been cooling.

As Congress scrutinizes new energy and climate legislation, many seem to be asking: Is it getting cooler or warmer?

The answer, according to a new study, is that we need to concentrate on the long-term trend, which points to an overall warming tendency over these past hundred years...

But how does this square with the observed fact that over the past decade world temperature has actually stayed the same, or even gone down?...

El Nino and other weather factors can cause a short reversal in the warming trend for a year. A 10-year reversal is less likely, but still possible. Just as in throwing a coin, seven heads in a row is unexpected, but it does happen now and then.

In the journal Geophysical Review Letters, Wehner says that even a period of 20 years of modest cooling -- the equivalent of throwing 20 heads in a row -- would not reverse the scientific finding that long-term world temperature is trending upward; the trend is based on data now stretching back more than a century.

What we have here is that the global warming advocates now realize that a decade-long cooling trend can no longer be ignored when they're making claims about global warming. They're basically saying that 10 years isn't long enough to make a determination about the temperature trends--they even try to cover themselves for another decade saying that even two decades of decreasing temperature wouldn't be enough to undermine the "scientific finding" of an upward trend.

So basically they want us to focus on their 100-year record--but ignore the last 10 years that suggest a possible cooling trend, and ignore data from over about 100 years ago that makes it clear that any warming seems to be a natural recovery from the "Little Ice Age" .

In other words, they want us to put on the blinders and look only at the segment of data that supports their conclusions but ignore the broader picture that pretty much discredits their position--or at least raises some very legitimate questions about their position.

Keep in mind that in the beginning it was "global warming." However, as more and more people experienced seemingly cool temperatures and harsh winters the mantra became, "Global warming can cause localized cooling" and they started using the term "climate change" rather than global warming. Now there is a decade-long trend of not just localized cooling, but of global cooling. So now the excuse is that while the supposed global warming is our fault and not natural climate variation, the recent decade of cooling is just some short-term natural variation.

The constant excuses and effective backpedaling of those that have faith in the theory of global warming is getting amusing to watch. Science isn't about making excuses that allow you to continue to believe in a theory that the data doesn't support--it's about evolving a theory that coincides with actual observations.

Global warming theory has never been about coming up with a theory that matches the data. It has been about manipulating and spinning the data to try to match it with the theory that really hasn't changed since it was proposed. This becomes more and more obvious as the data continues to refuse to cooperate with them.