Also making the rounds: if Hell refuses to freeze over, maybe Britain will instead:

The ocean current that gives western Europe its relatively balmy climate is stuttering, raising fears that it might fail entirely and plunge the continent into a mini ice age.

The dramatic finding comes from a study of ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which found a 30% reduction in the warm currents that carry water north from the Gulf Stream.

The real problem is that nobody really knows what this means. We've only been studying ocean currents seriously for fifty years or so, and ocean temperatures have been studied for an even shorter period of time. Believing this is the harbinger of an ice age is like believing aliens have sucked your house into their spaceship just because you heard a "bang" downstairs.

Do I think global warming is real? Yeah, I think it's real, and pretty obvious at that. Do I think it will lead to global catastrophe? Nope. The timelines most people who take baths and get haircuts advocate telescope these changes across a full century or more. Over that period of time we can not only cope with the changes, we'll probably make money off them.

If it all drops in the pot tomorrow, will it be more expensive to fix than if we'd taken a longer view? Well, yes, that too. But I'm not going to let the prosperity of my country be held hostage to a political tug of war over something that might happen.

Put it a different way. When one nation got frightened by a basketball-sized orb twirling around the planet, it reacted by placing men on the moon in less than the lifetime of a cat. If it became patently obvious that global warming's effects were going to compress down to years instead of decades, I'm quite confident the industrialized nations of the world would be up to the task of finding a solution.

Naive? Maybe. But my naivete doesn't cost us a dime, and lets the proven-to-work efficiencies of the market handle the problem in the meantime. Yours would risk my child's future on a theory based on a model that even its proponents can't get to work properly twice in a row.

Doesn't sound like much of an improvement if you ask me.