From the British Telegraph:2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Even better is this look at how divorced from reality much of the doomsdaying has been:

Rocky Mountain News, December 24:

Unhappily, the past five years, total worldwide carbon-dioxide emissions have exceeded even the pessimistic business-as-usual models.

The business-as-usual scenario will cause average temperatures to rise by about 4 degrees in Aspen by the time todays toddlers have graduated from college, Williams said.

The new study was sponsored by Aspen Mountain and the Park City Mountain Resort said Lazar. Two nonprofits the Aspen Global Change Institute and the Park City Foundation are working with the ski areas to better understand environmental climate change.

Ski industry officials know that warming is real, and that small changes in climate have substantial effects on ski areas, said Williams, also a fellow at CU-Boulders Institute of Arctic and Alpine research.

As Newsbusters (source for all these links) reports:The following was reported the same day by Julie Rust, the director of Vail, Colorado's, ski patrol:

As of this morning, we have had 148 inches of cumulative snowfall, 98 inches just this month! Vail is seeing the best December snow in 8 years. This is good stuff!

This was the Local's Lowdown from Aspen Friday:

This has to be the best Christmas skiing week I can recall in my 15 year tenure in Aspen. Earlier this week we had a very healthy dumping of snow and my legs are still suffering for it. Knee to thigh deep snow on top of the mountains. You had to find the steepest pitches just to get enough speed to go down.

In fact, conditions look pretty spectacular for this early in the season all over Colorado according to that state's official ski report website.

How did we spend so much time, money, energy, and years of frantic worrying over an issue that very well may be completely fictional? Money. We tied research grants to orthodox dogma on the global warming issue. We listened to Al Gore, even though his own double standards in his lifestyle should have showed us that he didn't really believe what he was preaching.
Money.

Money does a lot of talking:
Al Gore just won a Nobel Prize for teaching the world to think green, but he's also showing he knows a thing or two about another kind of green: money. Since 2000, according to published reports, the former veep has transformed himself from a public servant with around $1 million in the bank to a sparkling private consultant with a net worth estimated to be north of $100 million. He's a senior adviser to Google, a board member at Apple and now a newly minted general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that made billions investing early in Netscape, Amazon and Google.

Gore has pledged to hand over his KP "salary" to Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit he chairs. But the gift is more symbolic than material. Gore's salaryhis cut of the 2 percent "management fee" that KP partners get on all investmentsis typically a sliver of the total compensation that VCs receive. If Gore's profit-sharing deal is anything like the firm's other 23 partners, he's also in line to collect tens of millions of dollars a year. That's because partners carve up 30 percent of the profits if and when the alternative-energy start-ups that KP supports go public or are sold. (Kleiner Perkins declined to comment on Gore's compensation, but his communications director, Kalee Kreider, confirmed that he plans to donate only his "guaranteed income" to charity.)
That's a Newsweek article of just a year ago, and Newsweek is hardly a bastion of conservative thought.

But then, if the press had been doing its job (its real job, not its moonlighting as Democratic party mouth pieces), we'd not have seen outrageous misrepresentations of the facts like these: Scientists who have been skeptical about manmade global warming have been called traitors or handmaidens of big oil. The Washington Post asserted on May 28, 2006 that there were only "a handful of skeptics" of manmade climate fears. Bill Blakemore on Aug. 30, 2006 said, "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such (scientific) debate on global warming." U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said it was "criminally irresponsible" to ignore the urgency of global warming. U.N. special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland on May 10, 2007 declared the climate debate "over" and added "it's completely immoral, even, to question" the U.N.'s scientific "consensus." In July 23, 2007, CNN's Miles O'Brien said, "The scientific debate is over." Earlier he said that scientific skeptics of manmade catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."
Walter Williams has more.

And so does the Daily Tech:
Scientist fired by Al Gore was told, "science will not intrude on public policy".

Noted energy expert and Princeton physicist Dr. Will Happer has sharply criticized global warming alarmism. Happer, author of over 200 scientific papers and a past director of energy research at the Department of Energy, called fears over global warming "mistaken".

"I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect", said Happer. "Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science."

We should have remembered that Gore got a D and a C- in two of his science courses at Harvard, and he flunked 5 of the 8 classes he took in Divinity school.

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[Source: The Common Room]

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