Charles Dudley Warner, who co-authored The Gilded Age with Mark Twain, put his finger on a universal human behavior with the above-headlined quote. And his observation was accurate. Until now. From the 1970s forward, people have not only been arguing about weather, they've been trying to create weather-altering strategies. If debaters weren't so deadly serious, these human foibles would be a laughing matter.

Thirty years ago nationally respected academies and their climatologists were alarmed by variations in the weather. Predictions were dire. Just look around, said those issuing the warnings. For the United States, 1973 brought record numbers of tornadoes, they pointed out. Vital monsoon rains failed to appear in Southeast Asia. People and special interest groups began publicly speculating about "widespread crop failure."

The Northern Hemisphere, said climatologists, had grown ominously cooler from the 1950s through the 1970s. That cemented it. Global cooling was underway. And human activity, specifically industrial activity, was the culprit.

Sound familiar? Thirty years haven't changed catastrophic predictions much. Weather is still an obsessive-compulsive national topic. Erratic weather patterns still worry humans. If it isn't El Ni–o, it's his little sister La Ni–a. The only significant change is the trend, which has changed to its polar opposite.

Take two recently published studies. They provide a wonderful illustration of the confusing, conflicting and contradicting data uncovered by scientists who attempt to unlock nature's secrets. For all of the 1990s, it was a doomsday truism that global warming is slowly melting glaciers and ice sheets on both poles. The truism is held especially dear by those who would be environmentalists. Almost daily they obsess about "greenhouse gases" (as in man-made pollutants and livestock indiscretions).

Consider, though, a new study by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The study's results complicate life for climate-change debaters. Analyzing data made available through satellite mapping, scientists were astounded to learn that despite what had been thought to be a 10,000-year thinning trend, Antarctic ice is actually growing thicker. That's right, thicker. And it has been for some time.

It's a fact: The West Antarctic ice sheet is bulking up. It's the same one cited by many scientists over the past decade in their oft-published concerns of huge chunks of it sliding off the continent into the ocean, raising global sea levels 16 feet (or up to 20, depending on how direly the quoting scientist needs funding).

But for those worried that this contradicts global warming concerns, relax. All researchers involved confirm that far from refuting the global warming theories, these new data simply show a more complex picture of weather patterns. Doom is still possible.

Yet another study in Antarctica surprised yet other researchers who documented a sharp cooling trend over the past 14 years. They found Antarctic temperatures have cooled since 1966. But, again, don't worry. It's still possible, according to uncritical news reports, that the cooling trend is linked to . . . you guessed it . . . global warming, which makes it cooler, or, er, something like that. But don't worry; it's scientific. And it's bad.

Which all leads to one inescapable conclusion: We must all do something, anything, before new evidence further confuses the issue.