The head of the Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday countered Obama administration claims that a landmark climate bill would be a boost to the economy.

President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats championing the bill have said mandating greenhouse-gas caps, renewable energy and efficiency standards would be a boon to an ailing economy, creating new low-carbon industries. Millions of so-called green jobs would be created under the cap-and-trade legislation being considered in the Senate, Democrats say.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf warned a Senate energy panel that there would be "significant shifts" from emissions-intense sectors such as oil and refining firms to low-carbon businesses such as wind and solar power.

"The net effect of that we think would likely be some decline in employment during the transition because labor markets don't move that fluidly," Mr. Elmendorf said, testifying before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

"The fact that jobs turn up somewhere else for some people does not mean there aren't substantial costs borne by people, communities, firms and affected industries," he said.

The recent corporate resignations from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have played in the media as a case of enlightened corporate stewardship vs. blinkered old businesses. But there's far more to this story-not least the way that Apple and Nike are putting green political correctness above the long-term interests of their own shareholders.

The Chamber needs "a more progressive stance on this issue" of climate change, declared Apple Vice President Catherine Novelli in a letter of resignation from the business lobby on October 5. Added Nike, announcing its resignation on September 30 from the Chamber board though retaining its membership: "US businesses must advocate for aggressive climate change." Both decisions were ostentatiously leaked to the media.

The first point to understand is the role of Al Gore, who is a member of the Apple board and perhaps the leading supporter of President Obama's cap-and-tax anticarbon legislation. Mr. Gore has also invested in renewable energy technologies that could make him even richer than he already is if new climate rules make renewables more competitive with carbon energy.

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.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

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.

The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.

And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

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.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

Three top Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are calling on the Obama administration to release detailed records about how White House energy and climate adviser Carol Browner is influencing policies at U.S. EPA.

"We are concerned about the role of Presidential 'czars' and their influence over regulatory policy-making at federal agencies," Sens. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), David Vitter (R-La.) and John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) wrote in a letter yesterday to top administration officials.

Obama's policy czars "appear to have decision-making authority commensurate with Senate-confirmed, Cabinet level officials," the senators wrote. "For this reason, we are requesting specific information about White House Coordinator of Energy and Climate Policy Carol Browner, and how her office has exercised authority over the Environmental Protection Agency."

The senators sent their request to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, head of the White House regulatory review office Cass Sunstein, White House Council on Environmental Quality Chairwoman Nancy Sutley, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Energy Secretary Steven Chu.