Global warming means global warming — even when it’s cooling. According to Reuters:

With the world sweltering through one of the hottest years on record, some icy bastions have been getting frostier in defiance of global warming.
The rare cool spots, from Canada to China, cause headaches for policy makers seeking to impose expensive measures to curb emissions from cars and factories blamed for blanketing the globe and driving up temperatures.

Common sense suggests that we should have a better handle on what’s happening with the climate — including man’s influence over it — before taking drastic and costly steps to curb warming (er, cooling), steps that may prove futile.

Tomorrow Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham and Commerce Secretary Don Evans will release the Climate Change Science Program’s (CCSP) strategic plan. The plan will outline “research activities to be undertaken by 13 agencies and departments of the federal government to determine the causes and effects of natural and human-induced global climate change.” So until their plan bears fruit to help us understand what’s happening, what’s the best explanation for the cool spots? “We are disrupting the entire climate system,” Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N.’s main panel on climate change told Reuters. “It’s not as though there is going to be a uniform warming of the entire planet.” Got that? Warming, cooling, whatever.