It's still cold outside

Here's more detail on the post-1997 cooling trend: it really is cold out there, and this winter's snow and ice accumulation trends are sharply up. They've been inching up since the end of the 90s, but this winter's additional increment is the largest since the early 90s. (Hat tip to Instapundit.) Contrary to the ignorant hot air from Gore, it's the latitudinal coverage of the ice that is tied directly to "global warming" or "global cooling," not the ice thickness.

By itself, the thickness is just a sign of how much snow has fallen, itself a function of the humidity. Since colder air has lower water vapor content, colder winters and less snowfall will produce thinner ice sheets (remember, they melt a little every summer, regardless). Of course, this sort of effect needs several years before it takes hold. This is not science that's hard to understand - it just takes turning off the tube and thinking for a few minutes about things that everyone in northern climates sees every winter.

Something else has become clear: since the IPCC and other "global warming" hysterics have silently abandoned their case for the pre-late 70s climate, and they are ignoring or blocking the now-obvious post-1997 climate trends, the entire empirical case for "global warming" rests on the 20-year warming period (which no one disputes) from the late 70s to the mid-90s. All contrary data have been or soon will be "corrected" by being "recalibrated" to the bogus "hockey stick" extrapolations - all extrapolated from that limited period of warming.