Remember the climate catastrophe predicted by science savant Al Gore and 97 percent of his colleagues in climatology, meteorology, and alchemy? The world was warming, the seas were rising, and polar bears were packing up all their personal items, locking their tray tables, and putting their seats in the upright position.

Well, that rough landing, alarmist scenario is so last century, at this point. Literally, temperatures have not risen, visibly, annually, for going on 18 years now.

Thus, last week, another group of scientists came up with another, new hypothesis, based on computer models, rather than empirical evidence, like all “consensus science” should be. This time, the lads and lasses in the laboratory are convinced the world is heading for a cooling cycle, and there’s nothing former vice president Gore, and his friend President Barack Obama can do to stop the seas from rising, or whatever. Blame it all on the Sun.

According to media reports, a new study claims that between 2030 and 2040, solar cycles will change and bring about a global cooling to the Earth. This phenomenon, named the “Maunder Minimum,” first emerged between 1646 and 1715, when it was first observed by a husband/wife astronomy team in the late 19th century. Simply put, the Sun has regularly repeating cycles. While it was recently in a warming cycle, it will soon be in a cooling cycle. There’s nothing that Michael Mann — the controversial Penn State scientist who has claimed he was a Nobel laureate, even though he wasn’t — or any other person with a nifty “hockey stick” climate chart can do about it.

The new cooling climate model indicates that solar activity will decline by 60 percent during the 2030s to solar conditions last seen during the “mini ice age” that began in 1645, per the results presented by Prof. Valentina Zharkova at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting last week in Llandudno, a seaside resort in Conway County Borough, Wales.

Research was done with data from an observatory in California. The scientific details are a bit complicated, but to summarize the findings, Zharkova and colleagues examined three solar cycles-worth of magnetic field activity on the Sun. They also compared their predictions with average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity. “All the predictions and observations were closely matched,” notes the statement from the Royal Society of Astronomy.

The cycles of the different segments of the Sun will “cancel each other out,” and this will lead to a “significant reduction in solar activity,” notes Zharkova.

“Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,” says Zharkova.

Now, that 97 percent accuracy claim may be somewhat humorous, given the context here. Global warming fanatics have claimed for some time that 97 percent of scientists agree that the world is warming and that that is caused by human use of fossil fuels, and the only solution here is to radically reduce economic activity — e.g. pollution, driving one’s car, pasturing one’s cow — to reverse it all.

But other scientists have argued, based on other data sets, that any global warming that has happened on the Earth was in part caused by the Sun. This includes Willie Soon and Sebastian Lüning, who have taken a lot of flack for their research on the role of the Sun in this planet’s climate. Soon, in particular, was savaged by the liberal media for his stance, and the infamous DeSmogBlog inaccurately portrays both men as capitalist lackeys, doing the bidding of big oil.

The real issue for so-called environmentalists is not whether the globe is warming, or cooling, though. The environmental movement is, intellectually, a kindred spirit to other, earlier socialist movements that have rejected technology and called for a return to nature.

Even Pope Francis has been caught up in the clamor of the environmental Left, and last month issued a pastoral letter, claiming that mankind was the primary cause of global warming. This teaching is leading to local churches publishing, in their weekly newsletters, excerpts of the Pope’s screed, as my local church in suburban Chicago did over the weekend.

The story about the new hypothesis of global cooling broke in the Daily Mail of the U.K. late last week, but has not yet graced the web pages of most of the world’s liberal media outlets, who operate on the latest false narrative that the climate skeptics faced their “Waterloo” when the Pope came out on the side of the alarmist scientists, and politicians, last month.

But this latest development reported by the Royal Astronomical Society shows who really has the Napoleonic complex — and that would be the environmental Left.