So much for global warming – Wayland had a snow day last week. More like global freezing if Dr. Burton was giving out a snow day. (At the very least, hell must have frozen over.)

Even with last week’s snow storm, climate change continues its global rampage. In fact, the same day school was closed, NASA released a report showing that 2010 tied 2005 for the hottest year on record.

Those snow days? Sorry to be a killjoy, but they are only likely to become even more infrequent.

“It was the 34th year running that global temperatures have been above the 20th-century average,” wrote the New York Times. Ten out of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.

Despite the continual stream of new data showing rising temperatures and the growing volume of evidence that humanity is responsible, the likelihood of any climate change or green energy legislation is only dimming.

Less than a month after Election Day, House Speaker John Boehner fired the first shot in the new Congress’s war on climate change. The House Committee on Global Warming was abolished, and its responsibilities were transferred to the Energy and Commerce Committee.

The Energy and Commerce Committee is now chaired by Michigan Republican Fred Upton. Upton is the standard conservative climate change denier. In a recent op-ed, he wrote that he is “not convinced” that “carbon [dioxide] is a problem in need of regulation.”

To be fair, Upton is the lesser of two evils. Rep. Upton’s challenger for the chairmanship of his committee was Joe Barton. Yes, that Joe Barton, who apologized to BP for the “shakedown” of the company following its massive oil spill in the Gulf.

Upton or Barton in control, it is now almost certain that there will be no serious global warming legislation in the next two years. This could be catastrophic, and brings me to James Buchanan.

Buchanan was president of the US from 1857 to 1861, the very last years before our country ripped itself apart in the Civil War (1861-1865). Today, he is widely held to be among the worst presidents ever. It’s not that he failed in his attempts to hold the country together – it’s that he didn’t even try.

The global warming deniers who refuse to take action today – and, let’s be honest, that means mostly the Republican members of Congress – are the James Buchanans of global warming.

Future historians will look back and marvel that one of America’s two great political parties ignored decades of scientific evidence and refused to move to prevent catastrophic climate change, a strategic concern of not just America, but of humankind.