October 1 marked the 18th anniversary of no global warming as measured by Earth's climate satellite system. That announcement was made last week by John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama.

Christy and other scientists claim Earth is now in a cooling trend or at least a plateau, temperature-wise. No one's more aware of that fact that corn and soybean growers from the Midwest to the East Coast – confounded last year and this year by cooler, wetter conditions all summer, even into fall harvest. New England farmers are still waiting for summer.

Climate Change, Yes; Global Warming, No; Earth Cooling, Yes

Christy and Roy Spencer, former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, compiled raw temperature data collected from 14 instruments aboard various weather satellites. The data show no warming.

Yet, virtually all climate models used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted steeply rising temperatures over the past two decades. They were wrong, according to Christy and Spencer.

So were the dire predictions of the Arctic Ice Cap melting completely. It's still there, and there's much debate over whether it's shrinking. But there's no debate over the Antarctic Ice Cap, which has been growing at a record rate, and may have some impact on the current global cooling.

Carbon dioxide levels have been rising -- a 9% increase over the past 18 years. That's 33% of the total increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, submits Craig Idso, chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.

CO2 appears to have a lower climate sensitivity than claimed, suggests James Taylor, senior fellow for environmental policy at the Heartland Institute think tank. "The real-world climate proves the alarmist computer models overstate the warming properties of carbon dioxide. Even when Earth resumes its modest warming – likely at some point in the next couple of decades, the pace of warming will continue to be quite modest,

While U.S. EPA considers carbon dioxide emissions as pollutants, CO2 is necessary for life on this planet. Plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis to create the food plants and animals need to survive.

If there's a bottom line, it's this: Climatologists, scientists and politicians don't know nearly as much about Earth's climate as they think they do.