One of the biggest British cheerleaders for climate alarmism (and, remember, the BBC gets a pretty decent worldwide audience) finally comes clean: What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. 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.

I'm not surprised that the BBC is not allowing comments on this story. Surely, they and the writer, Paul Hudson, are receiving some seriously nasty and personal email since the publication.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

The report, to be released at the end of the month, should be interesting.

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth's great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

I guess we will wait to see if the people, like Easterbrook, who are out there doing actual science, using actual physical measurements, as opposed to looking at computer models (garbage in garbage out,) is right.

Of course, the climate alarmist argument is that the warming wouldn't have been as bad without Mankind's contribution, and that the cooling will not be as bad because of Mankind's influence. Or, they can go with the old standard that Climate Change (man-made) causes it to get hot, cold, wet, dry. In other words, every type of weather.