These are not happy times for the Church of Global Warming, which has been trying to repackage its manufactured hysteria as “climate change” for several years.  But according to the New York Times on Thursday, we’ve actually come full circle to where we began in the Seventies: global cooling.

After some flapdoodle about global temperature spikes (in fact, not only is there no evidence connecting human activity to any such spike, most recent data says there wasn’t much of a “spike,” and what heating occurred mostly leveled out a decade ago) and quoting the ridiculous Michael Mann of “hockey stick graph hoax” fame as an “expert,” the Times casually drops the same narrative that global-warming cultists have decried as heresy for the past thirty years:

Though the paper is the most complete reconstruction of global temperature, it is roughly consistent with previous work on a regional scale. It suggests that changes in the amount and distribution of incoming sunlight, caused by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, contributed to a sharp temperature rise in the early Holocene.

The climate then stabilized at relatively warm temperatures about 10,000 years ago, hitting a plateau that lasted for roughly 5,000 years, the paper shows. After that, shifts of incoming sunshine prompted a long, slow cooling trend.

The cooling was interrupted, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, by a fairly brief spike during the Middle Ages, known as the Medieval Warm Period. (It was then that the Vikings settled Greenland, dying out there when the climate cooled again.)

Scientists say that if natural factors were still governing the climate, the Northern Hemisphere would probably be destined to freeze over again in several thousand years. “We were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age,” Dr. Marcott said.

Instead, scientists believe the enormous increase in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization will almost certainly prevent that.

Wait, what?  Sunlight affects global temperatures?  Who could have seen that coming?

For the moment, leave aside those sensationalist claims about “enormous increases in greenhouse gases caused by industrialization” – a simple enough observation given that pre-industrial societies produce very little greenhouse gas, outside of human and animal flatulence, but not logically connected to any measurable shift in global climate.  Aren’t these scientists conceding that man-made global warming might be… good?  Wouldn’t that mean the people who have been trying to bankrupt Western industry with madcap environmental laws have also been ignorantly shoving us into the frozen hell of a new Ice Age?

The same thought occurred to a student encountered by British eco-gadfly James Delingpole, writing at the UK Telegraph:

I’ve been at my old school Malvern College all week, poisoning the minds of the young with my dangerous views on sustainability, climate change, “biodiversity” and other sacred green cows. But a lot of the time, it has to be said, my work wasn’t necessary. In one geography class specifically dedicated to climate change, the first kid to stick up his hand said: “What’s wrong with the world getting warmer anyway? It will mean we get nicer summers!”

Which is what the kids would no doubt refer to as an epic fail for all the official propaganda we’ve been fed these last few decades. The boys and girls in that particular class would have been precisely the target audience at which the Labour government aimed its infamous Bedtime Stories advert, the £6 million effort in 2009 commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change to scare impressionable kids witless with tales of a hideous carbon monster which was going to drown their puppies. If the enviro loons can’t even manage to brainwash the young with their lies, spin junk science, what chance do they have with grown ups?

Delingpole goes on to review polling data that shows most of the public doesn’t care about “climate change” and never really did, even back when Western nations weren’t grinding their way through endless recessions and limp “recoveries.”

And yet, the Church of Global Warming rose to incredible power across the West, even as their demands were blithely ignored by authoritarian states.  Countless billions in compulsory tithe has been extracted from taxpayers in America and Europe for this mandatory State religion.  It doesn’t matter that most of the public never really bought into the hype, because they didn’t oppose it strongly enough, and the Left saw it as the perfect vehicle for a profoundly moralistic crusade in favor of Big Government. You planet-ravaging vermin can’t be trusted, with all your dirty machines and consumerist greed!  You must be controlled, and those who resist are enemies of the planet itself, which speaks through a self-appointed environmentalist priesthood.  No debate can be permitted, because we haven’t got a single moment to lose!  And can you really blame us for erring on the side of caution, when the fate of the Earth is at stake?  How can you doubt that industry is killing the world – can’t you see those billowing clouds of smoke, hear the ominous rumble of the machines, and smell the carbon?

But the “consensus” in favor of climate change continues to slip away, with a “shock poll” last year showing that only 30 percent of meteorologists think global warming is worth worrying about.  The radical Greens are reduced to squabbling over slices of a shrinking panic pie, with the wind and solar crowds at each others’ throats, and cultists scrambling to come up with reasons why greenhouse-gas-friendly “fracking” is really the Devil’s work.  This week, Bloomberg News reported that “almost 90 percent of insurance companies lack a comprehensive plan to address climate change, and fewer than half of them view it as a likely source of financial losses.”  The demon lords of global warming are no longer fearsome enough to command billions of dollars, and thousands of jobs, in sacrifice – not when voters worry that something has gone deeply, badly wrong with their economy.

The heck of it all is that global cooling always was the more plausible, scientifically sound threat.  Those solar energy variations really might presage a significant drop in planetary temperature.  But global cooling wasn’t politically useful – it was too difficult to pin on human activity, and too hard to hype with voodoo fearmongering about wild weather patterns.  The people could not easily be convinced that their machines were making the world colder.  When they noticed it wasn’t getting consistently warmer, “global warming” became “climate change.”  Then they noticed that the “climate change” elite wasn’t wasting any time acting as if their extravagant lifestyles were killing the Earth, descending upon million-dollar eco-conferences in mighty fleets of carbon-spewing jets.  Now that Al Gore, the Pope of Global Warming, has lined his pockets with oil money, the game is pretty much over… and we’re left hoping that maybe his propaganda was just a little bit right, because Winter Is Coming, and man-made greenhouse-gas warming might be our best hope against it.