President Obama’s headed to Copenhagen next month to talk climate change. Al Gore’s headed toward profits that could make him the world’s first "carbon billionaire." But where’s global temperature headed?

Nowhere, it seems. The most reliable readings of the Earth’s temperature show that it peaked back in 1998. This was not widely reported in America, where the state of science reporting is dismal. But over in England, where they take that sort of thing more seriously, the British Broadcasting Corp. created quite a stir with an article headlined "What Happened to Global Warming?" In it, BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson gave a summary of the problems facing the alarmists: "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."

Hudson went on to cite numerous scientists skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. But perhaps the most damning observation came from a scientist who supports the theory. Mojib Latif is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group that set the panic off with its 1996 report on global warming. According to Hudson, Latif concedes "that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years."

Hmmm. Ten to 20 years is what I would call "the near future." Didn’t a certain former vice president of the United States win a Nobel Prize by pushing a movie that told us that the melting of the polar ice would cause sea levels to rise by up to 20 feet "in the near future?"

Perhaps Al Gore was talking about a different future, one in which he gets rich off the panic he helped create. If the Senate passes that cap-and-trade bill that’s now before it, Gore stands to make a fortune through his stake in the investment firm he set up with former Goldman-Sachs exec David Blood to deal in carbon credits. So there’s a lot at stake in that Senate decision for the firm known to Wall Street wags as "Blood and Gore." There’s even more at stake for consumers whose bills would go up by billions.

As for those senators, they’ll look pretty foolish if they pass a bill to curb global warming just as we enter a cooling trend. And Donald Easterbrook warns that is a distinct possibility. Easterbrook is a professor at Western Washington University who was quoted in that BBC article. When I called him at his home outside Seattle, Easterbrook informed me that we have just experienced the third coldest October in the past 115 years. There’s probably more cold to come, he said, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the climate will have little effect on it one way or the other. The reason? Contrary to popular belief, there just isn’t that much of it in the atmosphere.

"For every 100,000 molecules of air, only 38 are carbon dioxide," Easterbrook said. The global-warming crowd likes to say that CO 2 levels have risen 35 percent in the industrial era. "But 35 percent of nothing is still nothing," says Easterbrook, and the increase in CO 2 has virtually no effect.

The alarmists harp on that infinitesimal increase, he says, while they ignore the most prevalent greenhouse gas of them all — water vapor. Clouds reflect sunlight back into the sky. And that is at the center of a developing dispute among scientists. Easterbrook is on the side of a Danish scientist named Henrik Svensmark. In the 1990s, Svensmark developed a theory that links cloud formation to sunspots. When the number of sunspots is low, more cosmic rays get through to the atmosphere. And these rays, Svensmark theorizes, are the primary cause of cloud formation. The clouds reflect more sunlight back into space. Earth gets colder.

This fits in nicely with Easterbrook’s specialty, which is how ocean currents affect climate. "It turns out there is a correlation between ocean cycles and sunspots," he told me. And the historical record shows many climate shifts that correspond to sunspot activity.

"There were 6,000 feet of ice here that all melted very suddenly 15,000 years ago," Easterbrook said of his neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest. "There have been big ups and downs throughout history. How do you explain them?"

Well, if you want to control people’s lives and/or make a lot of money, you explain them the way a lot of politicians do. As for the scientists, they’re divided. Most agree that, all things being equal, it would be better for man not to alter the atmosphere at all. But that’s an entirely separate question from just what effect that alteration will have on the climate.

And the answer to that question is: Nobody’s quite certain.

Except, of course, Al Gore.