President Obama, the media chattering class and assorted know-nothings continue to sputter about global warming and steps we must take to combat carbon dioxide emissions as if it were gospel.

Their entire premise was once again shot down by Obama's own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The average June to August 2009 summer temperature for the contiguous United States was below average — the 34th coolest on record, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. August was also below the long-term average. This analysis is based on records dating back to 1895. For the 2009 summer, the average temperature of 71.7 F was 0.4 degree below the 20th century average. The 2008 average summer temperature was 72.7 F. CO2 emissions have continued to rise, so how can average temperatures be going down? It is impossible under the Obama-Gore hypothesis.

Further buttressing the cooling trend, all four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, University of Alabama-Huntsville, Remote Sensing Systems) have released updated data showing that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C to 0.75C — a value large enough to reverse nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All this in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down. This evidence shatters the myth of global warming.

Given these readily available facts, the environmental extremist solution is to tax those who emit greenhouse gases. The left is pushing their agenda to make CO2 into some poison gas like Zyklon B. CO2 is one of the life-sustaining gases that is part of this planet's ecosystem. Neither controlling manmade CO2 emissions, nor even controlling the 30-times-greater amounts of naturally occurring CO2, will do anything to significantly mitigate global temperatures. The current period of global cooling we have entered is a strong indication of that. We are trying to create a solution for a problem that does not exist.

In 1998, the world began a cooling phase, just as it has done many times in the past. The reason, it appears, is tied to solar activity and the Earth's rotation — not carbon dioxide emissions. According to astronomer Milutin Milankovitch, who studied variations in the shape of the Earth's orbit around the sun and the tilt of the Earth's axis. He theorized that these cyclical changes and the interactions among them were responsible for long-term climate changes. Milankovitch studied three factors: changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis; variations in the shape of the Earth's orbit around the sun; and precession, or changes in how the tilt of the axis is oriented in relation to the orbit. The Earth's temperature during the Medieval Climate Period was an average of 10 degrees warmer than present day; this occurred without the pollution of modern society or even half the number of people that are presently on the planet. This seems to validate Milankovitch's theory.

During this recent cooling phase, atmospheric carbon dioxide has continued to go up, increasing 15 to 20 percent. This divergence creates an ozone hole-sized problem in greenhouse hypothesis. But that hasn't discouraged the global-warming advocates. This issue has become the new religion for the left; they mistakenly believe man, not God, controls the climate.

As the recent tsunami demonstrates, we have no control over the environment. We have no control over earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, continental drift or shift, volcanic eruptions, reversal of the magnetic poles, meteor showers, sunspots, tornadoes, thunderstorms, wild fires, ice ages, and warming periods. It is the absolute height of man's arrogance to think he can control the atmosphere.

Since the Earth is not warming, the name has been revised to "climate change." This new name is a catchall. You now can blame everything on man — like China having its coldest winter in 100 years, the snow last winter in Las Vegas and New Orleans or Baghdad seeing its first snow in all recorded history! It is not warming; it is climate change!