This is the winter of environmentalists’ discontent. They desperately want the earth to be warming to prove Al Gore’s truth inviolate and they are going to make you pay thousands of dollars for it no matter whether it’s true or not.

But the weather has been inconveniently cold. Thirty-two states have experienced record or near-record lows this winter – poking holes in the predictions of imminent fiery doom. Just ask the diehard global warming activists who showed up in Washington last week to protest the nation’s use of coal. Their event was hampered by nearly a foot of snow in the nation’s capital – enough to freeze out luminaries like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Still, there they were, a couple thousand idiots standing in a winter wonderland, chanting about global warming. What’s amazing is that NASA’s climate chief James Hansen was part of this foolishness. Here we have a man who the left keeps telling us is so smart we need to listen to everything he says and he doesn’t have the public relations sense of a freshman communications major.

I have a news flash for Mr. Hansen – it gets cold in the winter. Sometimes it snows – even in D.C. If you want to promote global warming, look at a thermometer and wait until that red stuff climbs up real high.

This would seem the basis of a good strategy. Cede the winter months to your critics and opponents and keep the global warming activism to times when you might actually get warm weather.

Only a fool would hold a global warming event in a foot of snow – unless he or she was desperate.

That desperation might get to the heart of the issue. Hansen recently told Britain’s Observer that time was running out – fast. “We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world.” Prince Charles, a fellow alarmist with a scientific resume as microscopic as Al Gore’s, recently declared we have “less than 100 months to act" on climate change.

But four years, eight years or Gore’s much-cited 10 years all add up to one thing. It’s not the planet that’s running out of time, it’s the environmentalists. The warming of the earth has flat lined like Tom Daschle’s political career.

In fact, now the theme – even from the global warming camp is … (drum roll, please) we could have up to three decades of cooling. Michael Reilly, of Discovery News, summed it up well: “Earth's climate continues to confound scientists.” He quoted a new study by Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, saying “global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.”

Just as the global warming reality is cooling, the opposition is heating up. This week marked the second annual “International Conference on Climate Change” in New York, sponsored by The Heartland Institute. It brought together hundreds of climate skeptics from around the world and was headlined by European Union President Vaclav Klaus.

Klaus got to the heart of the matter during his opening night address. The climate debate isn’t just about temperature, he told the gathering of scientists and public policy experts. He said “environmentalists want to change us and our behavior” because “their mission is control.”

They are working hard to take that control. Forget the laughably inept Kyoto treaty. Environmentalists and politicians are working to give birth to its bastard child of a successor in Copenhagen this December. The midwives are already prepping for the birth of this Frankenstein baby in the run up to the G-20 conference in April.

Advocates want the meeting of some of the world’s powerhouses to focus not just on economics but on going green. That way they can show they have all the major nations working together.

That’s not the only push for quick action. Denmark's minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, is urging Obama to ram through global warming laws prior to Copenhagen and Obama looks like he is doing as instructed. His cap-and-trade proposal is already on deck despite criticism that it will cost an already damaged economy an average of $2,180 a year. Even Obamaphile Warren Buffett says such a tax is “pretty regressive,” which means ordinary people will pay through the nose for it and elitists will fly around and tell us how to live.

With Democratic control of Congress virtually a lock, cap-and-trade could fly through faster than lies from the mouth of a politician. Just in time, perhaps, to encounter a problem that may well be going the opposite direction for 30 years.