The hard evidence is in: a twelve-month long drop in world temperatures just wiped out a century of warming. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

According to the report, the cooling is pretty dramatically driven by the sunspot cycle — as this blog has been reporting for several years now — and not by still-climbing CO2 emissions. As the report says, “While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.”

Ya think? Really? A gigantic nearby star has more effect on our tiny planet’s climate than, say, Al Gore’s SUV?

Could that have also been true when Earth (and several other planets, according to NASA data) were warming, you know, because the Solar cycle was really really active for a number of years?

So it seems. And though this may save us from some nasty global socialism, the irony is pretty rich. As the story puts it, “Let’s hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat.”

Yeah. Sure is, Al. It sure is.

Apple’s iTunes store is now the number 2 music retailer in America, behind only Wal-Mart. 50 million customers and they sold 20 million songs on Christmas Day alone. Impressive.

Iran, of course, dismisses the nuke documents as fakes, as will MoveOn and the State Department. But you know, when even the UN is saying it, sheesh.