It is snowing in Houston, Texas today, with at least two inches of accumulation expected throughout that area and as much as six inches in parts of Southeast Texas over the course of the next 24 hours. The weather system producing that snowfall is on its way eastward, meaning that by tonight it will hit Baton Rouge and dump an inch to an inch and a half of snow on the Capitol City overnight.

This is the earliest snowfall in memory in either place. Last year when Baton Rouge picked up three inches of snow Dec. 10-11 it was unprecedented; we’re getting it a week earlier this year. Typically speaking, it doesn’t snow in South Louisiana at any point during a winter.

Of course, experts will tell you that weather does not equal climate, and that’s true. But today’s weather report is one of a multitude of anecdotes showing that this is not a climate in the process of heating up. To the contrary, we’re getting colder. Snow in Baton Rouge in early December is not an indication of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick graph” accurately forecasting temperature.

People are starting to grasp this, as in the wake of the Climaquiddick/Climategate/CRUtape Letters scandal a Rasmussen poll finds that 52 percent of those surveyed reject the idea that the “science is settled” on global warming, with only 25 percent saying that the debate is over. Polls have shown for some time that Americans don’t favor the prescriptions and conclusions of the AGW movement, but this one, in the wake of the collapse of the East Anglia scandal (which is still being given extremely short shrift by the major television news networks) shows that the AGW movement is falling apart.

Meanwhile, author and global warming skeptic Chris Horner is suing NASA under the Freedom of Information Act in order to force open their climate files and find out if something similar to East Anglia is going on there. Past actions at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, headed by global-warmist and publicity hound James Hansen, indicate the possibility of just such a pattern; after all, last year Hansen was caught falsifying temperature records in an attempt to show that October 2008 was the hottest month on record. Horner claims that NASA has been denying his FOIA requests for two years now, and given that Hansen’s name comes up a few times in the CRU e-mails it’s not unreasonable to ask for some honest disclosure on behalf of the U.S. taxpayers who fund the salaries of Hansen and his cohorts.

Hansen isn’t the only AGW enthusiast under the gun today, as prominent Hollywood conservatives Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd
are now calling for a recall of Al Gore’s Oscar for his 2007 propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth.

Meanwhile, next week is the soon-to-be-infamous Copenhagen climate summit, and President Obama is reportedly going to attempt to commit the U.S. to steep carbon dioxide emissions reductions. This comes amid a Wall Street Journal piece by MIT’s Richard K. Lester whereby the effort required to meet the president’s goals is assessed as nearly impossible. It would seem that in the wake of the CRU e-mail scandal no American president should be committing this country to anything on global warming without an investigation, a quite reasonable assertion now being made by Sarah Palin on her Facebook page.

One American leader who won’t be boycotting Copenhagen is Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who says he’s going as a one-man truth squad to debunk AGW as much as possible and to inform those in Denmark that Obama lacks the power under the U.S. Constitution to commit America to anything without the consent of the Senate. Inhofe says the Europeans are a little fuzzy on that topic and he wants to help them out.

“I’m planning on going to Copenhagen, too,” says Inhofe. “I’ll be leading a truth squad, to let the Europeans know that if Democrats or Obama make any promises, that they’re really just making empty pledges. European-style climate policy is not going to happen in America, period. I’m doing everything I can to ensure that continues. The Europeans can agree to whatever they want to in Copenhagen. I really don’t care what they do. I just want to make sure America is not a part of it.”

Of course, you can believe the Climategate scandal is unimportant and just a blip on the screen and you can still believe in global warming all you want, but as Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review you’ve still got to agree that Copenhagen is a waste of time:

Climategate is a big deal, but we should be clear: It’s not why cap-and-trade should be scuttled, and it’s not why Copenhagen will produce nothing, save enormous expense-account submissions for cookie-pushing climate diplomats (and a massive amount of greenhouse gases; the U.N. estimates the twelve-day “green” confab will produce 40,584 tons of CO2 equivalents, roughly equal to Morocco’s carbon footprint in 2006).

Here is one simple, inconvenient truth: No developing country with significant and remotely accessible stocks of fossil fuels will agree to leave the stuff in the ground.

As if on cue with Goldberg’s piece, India now says they won’t sign any binding carbon agreement put forth in Copenhagen. That’s not news, but when a billion Indians are content to burn as much oil and coal as they can in order to modernize their economy and become prosperous you can more or less throw out anything America might do in reducing carbon emissions.

Is any of this making a dent in the ruling powers that be in America? See for yourself…

“Several thousand scientists have come to the conclusion that climate change is happening. I don’t think that’s anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore,” press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this week.

In fact, there certainly seems to be a “hit the gas” approach taken by the AGW movement. A shockingly biased and unbalanced AP piece on the wire goes through all of the steps being taken to prepare for the falling of the sky…

“It’s something that’s been neglected, hasn’t been talked about and it’s something the world will have to do,” said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Adaptation is going to be absolutely crucial for some societies.”

Pachauri, you might remember, shared Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize as the head of the IPCC – which, it must be understood, is a political body and not a scientific one. Here’s proof: the original draft copy of the 1995 IPCC report had this to say…

“Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced..No study to date has positively attributed all or part of observed climate changes to anthropogenic causes.”

Of course, the final draft of that report came out a little differently…

“The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on climate.”

Such are the efforts which win Nobel Prizes.

Finally, back across the pond there will now be a “full investigation” into the data and methods of the East Anglia CRU by the British government. But one wonders how hard the Labor government there will really push for full disclosure and actual disinfectance given this…

Ed Miliband, Britain’s climate change secretary, on Thursday called those challenging the mainstream scientific view on climate change irresponsible and dangerous.

“We have to beware of the climate saboteurs, the people who want to say this is somehow in doubt, and want to cast aspersions on the whole process,” Miliband told reporters.

One would think that this would present a fantastic opportunity for Britain’s Conservatives to seize the issue – particularly given that a poll taken before the Climategate scandal broke found only 41 percent of Brits suscribe to AGW. But the Tories under David Cameron have hitched their wagon to the man-made global warming horse in pursuit of “electability,” and while there are several Conservative MP’s who have begun to challenge Cameron’s crunchy policies a full-scale populist conservative revolt like the one Tony Abbott has engineered in Australia hasn’t materialized.

Abbott, by the way, is a politician well worth paying attention to – he’s a Sarah Palin type who doesn’t pull punches and isn’t afraid to call out socialist nonsense when it’s there for all to see. We have some of those here in America, but not enough.