Al Gore must take all of us for fools. Unfortunately for him, we’ve been paying attention. Here’s a collection of the latest “global warming” stories:

• Caribou, Maine set a new all-time snowfall record of 182.5 inches, breaking the last record set in 1955
• Snowfall records were also set in Ann Arbor, Michigan and its college rival Columbus, Ohio
• In Milwakee, it was the second snowiest winter on record
• New evidence suggests that since 1998 global temperatures have either plateaued or have gone down.
• Less than a month ago, parts of Ohio were digging out from a record-setting blizzard, which dumped over 20 inches of snow in parts of the state, besting the previous record (set in 1910) by over 5 inches
• Chicago, Grand Rapids, and New England all got hammered hard with the fluffy white stuff
• Quebec came close to tying its 1971 snowfall record
• Snow cover over North America, China, Siberia, and Mongolia is the greatest its been since 1971

And one last tidbit:

• After calling people who don’t believe in man-made global warming “flat earthers” on 60 Minutes, Al Gore launches a $300 million dollar advertising blitz to raise global warming awareness. Where is the $300 million coming from? Mum’s the word there. And Al, just wondering… if it’s such an obvious problem, why do you have to raise awareness of it?

Sorry, Al. I’m just not buying what you’re selling. And most people aren’t either.

While our economy continues to slog through recession, while Congress and the President authorized spending even more money that we don’t have in the form of "tax rebates", and while we already pay close to 20 cents per gallon in federal gasoline taxes, Congressman John Dingell from Michigan, is proposing another 50-cent-per-gallon tax on gasoline.

This would:

1. Do nothing to stop "global warming"
2. Impose even more unnecessary "sin taxes" upon us
3. Bring the economy to a screeching halt

While Dingell’s idea will likely lie dormant until after the 2008 election, the idea of carbon taxes is not. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all support some type of system that either directly or indirectly will raise prices to penalize polluters.

Michigan Congressman Wants 50-Cent Tax Hike on Every Gallon of Gas

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its “lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Oh really now? So is it Al Gore who’s really “preying on our fears?”  Certainly there will be something we can do about “global climate change” (which is the new way of controlling the conversation, since it’s becoming increasingly obvious that global warming is a farce.)

Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

So the sun changes the climate here on earth? No, really? Who would’ve thought that a 1,392,000 kilometer-wide ball of thermonuclear hydrogen burning at 28 million degrees would affect us here on earth. Sarcasm aside, this prediction, unlike “global warming” has some prior evidence to back up it’s hypothesis:

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

Be sure to read the full article: Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age