It’s been a bad week for global warming.

Cairo saw its first snow in 100 years. Oregon, like several other states, reached its coldest temperature in 40 years. Chicago saw its coldest days ever, and – as if to add finality to the trend – Antarctica reached the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere on earth.

But no matter how cold it gets, global-warming adherents insist it's all part and parcel of what they believe to be abnormal and soon-to-be-catastrophic warming of the planet’s surface due to man’s reckless introduction of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere.

Ironically, just a few years ago, believers in anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming – since renamed “climate change” – claimed cold weather and snow would soon be just a memory.

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"Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past," announced the headline in Britain’s newspaper the Independent at the turn of the millennium. The report quoted David Viner, senior research scientist at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, long considered an authoritative resource for global warming research, as saying snow would soon be "a very rare and exciting event" in Britain.

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.

However, the authoritative reputation of East Anglia was seriously downgraded in 2009 when leaked emails proved researchers there were engaged in a major scheme to manipulate and suppress evidence against global warming, misconduct London's Telegraph newspaper called "the worst scientific scandal of our generation."

Fast-forward to last year when much the opposite prediction was being trumpeted by the London Daily Mail Online, which headlined "Britain faces coldest winter for 100 years as Big Freeze follows floods with wind so strong it blows water upwards."

That report, which included many references to "torrential rain," "freezing winter" and "blizzards," quoted local officials saying they wanted to avoid "a repeat of two years ago, when a lack of gritters and snowploughs caused roads and transport networks to grind to a halt."

The rhetoric and predictions of global warming acolytes have been every bit as confusing in the United States, with former vice president and carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore telling an audience in a 2009 speech that "the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years." And of course his 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth's oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.

How such predictions square with current weather reality – multiple reports of the coldest weather in a generation – is unclear.

Fact: The earth has not warmed for the last 15 years. This now-widely-known truth was confirmed in September in a leaked report, the result of six years’ work by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, touted as the world authority on climate change and its supposed causes.

Indeed, researchers were so flummoxed at the utter lack of evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming that, as the London Daily Mail reported, the “world's top climate scientists were told to ‘cover up' the fact that the earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years.”

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In light of all this, why are so many still so alarmed over global warming? And more consequentially, why is the Obama administration still frantically promoting the idea that global warming is an imminent threat?

Last week, for example, the Obama administration was lobbying for the notion that global warming is endangering the earth, even as a massive snowstorm was moving across the nation.

At Frontpage Mag, columnist Daniel Greenfield headlined his report: "Obama's global warming task force met as snowstorm shut down federal government."

"Ah, but it's not global warming anymore,” Greenfield wrote. “After a few too many snowstorms, the Warmists learned their lesson. Now it's climate change. And it's responsible for all the weather. If weather happens … then climate change caused it."

In a recent CNN panel debate, global warming critic Marc Morano of Climate Depot responded to a question suggesting that current record cold temperatures are a harbinger of “climate change.”

"So, record cold is now evidence of man-made global warming?" he said. "What evidence would disprove climate change? It seems like no matter the weather, everything that happens, proves it."

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, responded that "top climate scientists in the world, thousands … are as confident that climate change is as real as they are that cigarettes make people sick." Brune added, dismissively, that global warming is “settled science.”

Really?, asks well-known scientist Art Robinson, who spearheaded The Petition Project which to date has gathered the signatures of 31,487 scientists who agree that there is "no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

"Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plan and animal environments of the Earth."

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Among the scientists signing the petition are 9,029 who hold doctorate degrees in their field of study.

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals,” the petition continues. “The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind."

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal Tech, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

He told WND, very simply, that weather does change over time and that the global system goes through cycles, some slightly warmer and some slightly cooler than others.

Right now it’s cool. On Friday, while it was snowing in Cairo for the first time in a century, Jerusalem received up to 20 inches.

Robinson also told WND it's interesting to be living in a period when carbon dioxide is rising, yet temperatures are flat or going down.

"We just have to get used to fluctuations," he said. "Earth does go through cycles."

What, then, is behind the widespread obsession – with so little evidence – with global warming, and the resulting desire to implement massive new governmental policies? The answer, says Robinson, is not complicated: "Power and money."

Power is obtained through laws and rules created in response to supposed global warming that limit what people can do with their own lives and property. Through carbon credits and "green" energy projects, which have made Al Gore enormously wealthy, massive amounts of money change hands.

Just weeks ago, the United Nations and World Bank lobbied for spending $600 billion to $800 billion a year on "sustainable energy" to replace oil and gas.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim declared a massive infusion of cash is necessary in the face of a "rising global thermostat." They implied the money would have to come from the world’s developed economies.

WND columnist Christopher Monckton, who advised the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on issues including global warming, a year ago was in Qatar at a conference on climate change and claimed that the strategies proposed to “solve” global warming constitute the real "menace" to democracy.

"It was at once clear that the sole purpose of the climate scam, as the U.N. saw it, was to serve as a Trojan horse allowing it to achieve its long-held ambition of destroying national sovereignty and transferring all real political power to itself," he said.

"If America stands firm for just a few more years, until it becomes obvious to all that the mad scientists were more concerned with grants than with truth, we may yet prevent the world government that Mr. Ban [Ki-moon] longs for," he said.

In other words, global warming – “climate change” – is really all about redistribution of wealth and power, according to critics like Monckton and Robinson.

The U.S. has already given tens of millions of dollars to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but global warming took a severe blow a few years ago when the East Anglia scandal, dubbed “Climategate,” developed.

Examination of hacked emails from Phil Jones, head of the Norwich, England-based Climatic Research Unit, and others there revealed schemes to manipulate data and squelch skeptics.

Among the emails hacked from East Anglia and posted online was one that identified the researchers’ “problem”: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

Other scandals to plague global warming advocates include:

FOIGate: In which British officials are investigating whether East Anglia scientists refused to follow that nation's freedom-of-information law about their work.

ChinaGate: In which dozens of weather-monitoring stations in rural China apparently have disappeared, leading to higher temperature averages, since city levels frequently are warmer.

HimalayaGate: In which an Indian climate official admitted in January that he falsely claimed Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 to prod governments into action.

Many others, including PachauriGates I and II, SternGates I and II, AmazonGate (in which a claim that global warming would wipe out rain forests was exposed as a fraud), PeerReviewGate and RussianGate I and II.

One organization that focuses on debunking fraudulent or unsupported global warming claims, The Climate Depot, notes that in 1974, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the U.S. was alarmed over "dramatic climate anomalies." But back then, it blamed the seemingly ominous “climate change” on growing Arctic ice and called global cooling the "new norm.”