From alarmist Joe Romm: The top 10 global warming stories of 2008

If the Obama climate dream team is going to lead the nation and the world into a World War II scale effort to save humanity from self-destruction, they will be waging a difficult two-front war — against the ever-accelerating reality of climate change itself and against the immovable unreality of “anti-science conservatives.”

New Zealand: The year ahead

Likely, too, is the demise of man-made global warming as a certainty firmly held by Western governments.

Their plans to rort taxpayers for the costs of our methane discharges are bound to fail once the full impact of the current northern winter takes effect.

Most of Canada, North America and Britain is said to be under snow or ice or both, and in Britain at least people are talking of comparisons with the winter of 1962-63, when the country was under snow from December to March, or 1947 when snow fell on all but two days of the month and the drifts were 3m deep in the Chilterns.

Not quite as bad as the winter of 1647-48, mind you, when you could drive a coach along the frozen Thames.

But it looks as though all the polar bears that were facing a summer ice-free existence at the North Pole will, in fact, now be ice-bound, at least for a while.

Expect all those planned Otago wind farms to be abandoned and terms like "emissions trading", "carbon capture", "biofuels","energy gap" to be consigned to the place where "awesome" and "at this point in time" are located.