One of nature's clerics preaches without incardination — that is what hurricane specialist William Gray said, four days ago, of the man both formerly vice president and sedately minded. "For someone of his stature, he's a gross alarmist." Al Gore, Gray protests, "doesn't know what he's talking about."
Richard Lindzen, meteorology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as uncharitable to Gore's liturgy. Immaculate truth as Lindzen understands it confers "no such thing as an optimal temperature," and even if there were one, the industrialized world's own average rising far above it, "meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing."
Meanwhile, outside the tropics: after the first weekend that I heard, on the radio, a baseball game called on account of snow my local team, the Cleveland Indians, rescheduled the beginning of their regular season for a stadium in Wisconsin. Groundskeepers at Jacobs Field were slow in shoveling the diamond.
Climate worry isn't science. It's impassioned, hallucinatory sentiment. Happily, it may soon meet reason, and then its end. Where anecdote once happened to corroborate the claim, glances out the window nowadays reveal skies darkening, brightening; and temperatures rising and falling commensurate to the seasons. Yes, it gets too hot and too cold, then snow or rain falls on entirely the wrong day of the year, but to call weather mutable is to call it normal. Lurid possibility no longer acceptable for censure, a demand for proof is going to be made, and the "global warming" shamanists have none to adduce.