It’s been unusually chilly in Anchorage this summer. In fact, temperatures in the Alaskan city have reached 70 degrees only twice this year, compared with 49 times in 2004. A National Weather Service meteorologist predicted that 2008 will likely go down “as the summer with the least number of 65-degree days” on record.

But just last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came to the “unequivocal” conclusion that the Earth is on a dangerous warming trend that, in Al Gore’s words, puts “the survival of the United States of America as we know it ... at risk.” Looks like somebody forgot to send Mother Nature the memo.

Last week, the scientist who wrote the computer model that monitors Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol cast serious doubts on whether the Earth is getting warmer at all. David Evans was a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, so he’s no ordinary global warming “denier.” But Evans now says the scientific evidence compiled since 1999 has convinced him that he — and what he calls other global warming “alarmists” — were wrong.

What evidence? The telltale greenhouse signature — a hot spot about 10 kilometers up that would confirm carbon emissions’ role in global warming — has simply not been found, even by hundreds of instruments (radiosondes) that have been monitoring atmospheric temperatures for decades. In fact, Evans says, satellites all say the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the Earth’s temperature actually dropped 0.6 degrees Celsius last year — to what it was back in 1980.

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Furthermore, new ice cores dating back a half million years show that temperature rises an average 800 years before there is an accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon, which, Evans says, “says something important about which was cause and which was effect.”

Despite $50 billion spent worldwide since 1990 to avert a man-made climate catastrophe, Evans maintains there is still no scientific evidence that carbon emissions cause significant temperature changes.

But there is growing evidence that converting food to biofuel is putting millions of poor people in danger of starvation for — if the satellites and ice cores are right — no reason whatsoever.