By Erika Lovley, Politico.com

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation. While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

So far, members of Congress have not been keen to publicly back the global cooling theory. But both senators from Oklahoma, Republicans Tom Coburn and Jim Inhofe, have often expressed doubts about how much of a role man-made emissions play. “We want the debate to be about science, not fear and hypocrisy. We hope next year’s wave of new politics means a return to science,” said Coburn aide John Hart. “It’s the old kind of politics that doesn’t consider any dissenting opinions.”

The global cooling lobby’s challenge is enormous. Next year could be the unfriendliest yet for climate skeptics. Already, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) has lost his gavel, in part because his peers felt he was less than serious about tackling global warming.

The National Academy of Sciences and most major scientific bodies agree that global warming is caused by man-made carbon emissions. But a small, growing number of scientists, including D’Aleo, are questioning how quickly the warming is happening and whether humans are actually the leading cause.

Armed with statistics from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center, D’Aleo reported in the 2009 Old Farmer’s Almanac that the U.S. annual mean temperature has fluctuated for decades and has only risen 0.21 degrees since 1930 - which he says is caused by fluctuating solar activity levels and ocean temperatures, not carbon emissions. 

Data from the same source shows that during five of the past seven decades, including this one, average U.S. temperatures have gone down. And the almanac predicted that the next year will see a period of cooling. “We’re worried that people are too focused on carbon dioxide as the culprit,” D’Aleo said. “Recent warming has stopped since 1998, and we want to stop draconian measures that will hurt already spiraling downward economics. We’re environmentalists and conversationalist at heart, but we don’t think that carbon is responsible for hurricanes.”

D’Aleo’s organization, the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, is collaborating on the campaign with the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumer Coalition with members including Americans for Tax Reform, the National Center for Policy Analysis and Citizens for a Sound Economy. More than 31,000 scientists across the world have signed the Global Warming Petition Project, a declaration started by a group of American scientists that states man’s impact on climate change can’t be reasonably proven. Read more on it here.

See also this Politico piece on the so called “Gore Effect” here. See Lubos Motl comment on the Gore Effect here. Please write the author (elovley@politico.com) and thank her for two very fair and balanced pieces on climate change. You can be sure she will hear from the alarmists. Update: Dave Roberts and Joe Romm kings of scientific malpractice over at the alarmist blog Grist attacked Politico as expected. Dave Roberts of Grist has advocated Nuremberg- style trials for skeptics of warming (2006). Romm - who served under Gore as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from 1995 though 1998 - authored a piece amazingly entitled “Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?