Global Warmageddon is such an insidious enemy that it is at its worst when it isn’t even occurring. Damn! How does one fight at enemy like that? If that statement seems impossible, then I must refer you to two recent press reports.

The first, from the Associated Press, tells us with much urgency and no doubt, that the effects of global warming over the last 12 years (the 12 years since the Kyoto Protocol was written – apparently how the Cult of Warmageddon now dates time), have been far worse than any of the dire predictions made in the year 1 B.K. (Before Kyoto). In the mere dozen years A.K. (After Kyoto), global warming has caused rising sea levels, droughts, wildfires, storms, the melting of glaciers and one (but not the other) polar ice cap, plagues of beetles, and blackouts.

Heck, there is even a separate report that global warming has forced poor women into prostitution. Egad! Pimped by climate change. Now carbon dioxide has insulted the honor of our women. Who knew my carbon footprint was in the form of a strappy stiletto heel?

There’s just one problem: as documented by numerous reports, including this thorough piece from the left-leaning German magazine Der Spiegel, there has been no global warming for a decade now. And keep in mind that this is despite millions of dollars and thousands of people dedicated to looking really, really hard to see even the slightest warming. In fact, the Der Spiegel article quotes numerous global warming industry employees who are “baffled” by the “time out” global warming has taken. According to Der Spiegel: “Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years.”

While according to der weasel (Al Gore, as quoted in the AP report): “By far the most serious differences [sic] that we've had is an acceleration of the crisis itself.”

Oh my goodness, the accelerating stall. How will mankind cope with the incredible pace of non-change? As funny as it all might be, were the economy of the Earth not in the balance, the current incongruence between actual global temperatures and the dreadful chorus of doom from the disciples of global warming is a perfect natural experiment for those that wish to discern the truth.

For ten years now, there has been no global warming. This is evident in any graph of mean global temperature. Since there has been no global warming, it is obviously impossible for any event of the last decade to have been caused by global warming -- any more than it would be possible for any event in the last decade to have been caused by alien invasion or balanced federal budgets or the Detroit Lions winning the Super Bowl. If it didn’t occur, it cannot have any consequences.

Yet over the past decade, the media and academic press has been stuffed full of reports of the consequences of the global warming that did not occur. Hurricane Katrina was caused by the lack of global warming. Droughts in the Mountain West and southeast US were caused by the lack of global warming. Alternately, warm winters and unusually deep snowfalls in the Northeast have been reported as being caused by the lack of global warming. Global nonwarming has caused war in Darfur, crop failures in Asia, the spread of tropical diseases in temperate regions, and the loss of ice at the North Pole. At this point, I can only pray that actual global warming will occur to save us from all the horrid consequences of this Global Lukewarming.

When it comes to global warming, there is a dedicated cadre of researchers, reporters and various hangers-on that are operating in a curiously backward fashion: they believe that global warming is real and bad, therefore anything really bad is obviously caused by global warming. This belief is so devout that it cannot be shaken by anything so minor as a lack of actual global warming. Even when it doesn’t happen, global warming may kill us all. Oh, if only we had ratified Kyoto!

And in those rare instances in which the lack of global warming is begrudgingly acknowledged by the more moderate sects of the climatological doomsday cult, it is with a curiously loaded language: global warming has entered a “time out” or a “pause.” If you needed any more proof that Global Warmageddon is the basis of a new secular religion, surely this is it: its believers have faith that while the central figure in the cult may have gone away, it is doubtless that he will come again. Forget about carbon capture, perhaps we should worry about the carbon rapture.

The most frustrating thing for me in the debate over anthropogenic global warming is that the whole time that the proponents of the theory have been off in La-La land drawing untestable connections to every unpleasant event on Earth and then touting each as proof of their position, they have been constantly screeching that we must “look at the facts.” So let’s look at them.

Global warming was real. The Earth did get warmer for a period. The cause was never definitively established and every model based on the idea that it was caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions has failed to successfully predict even the basic trend of the climate over the past decade. Over that decade, the Earth failed to warm and even cooled to a statistically insignificant degree. The future may hold a return to warming, a continued stability, or a turn toward cooling. But whatever the case, it should be clear that every person and group that has blamed any event on the non-existent global warming over the last ten years should be disqualified from any future debate over climate change.

The promoters of the theory of global warming have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of simply acknowledging the basic facts that must drive any rational discussion. And when the doomsayers are no longer taken seriously by the majority of the population, perhaps they can then blame that on (the lack of) global warming as well.

Global warming may turn out to cause deafness -- to the claims of Chicken Littles worldwide.