For years, Al Gore has predicted that man's sins of carbon dioxide will bring calamity and apocalypse. He cited an increase in natural disasters.
Gore quietly dropped the contention that the increase is connected to manmade global warming this week after being called on it by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado.
"Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation," reported Andrew Revkin on a blog for the New York Times.
"When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years.
"The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels."
The slide has since disappeared from the show, Revkin wrote.
This was not happenstance. Pielke called Gore on his assertions. The link between manmade activity and natural disasters has not been established.
CRED, the source cited by Gore, even said so.
"Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading.
"Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one - even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future," CRED said about its own database.
We don't know what effect human activity is having on the climate.
I do not discount that better record keeping makes it appear as if conditions are getting worse.
It seems as if every rainstorm in the Atlantic in September gets a name now.
But Gore has been seizing on anything that moves as proof of his predictions of pending catastrophe.
I might take Gore seriously if he cut back on his own consumption of the Earth's resources, but since he consumes far more than I do, I just assume the guy is after political power. He was born into politics and will remain there until he dies at a very, very old age.
I interviewed Harold Stassen in 1984. He was running for president. Again.
As Mo Udall said, only embalming fluid removes the lust for the presidency from one's blood.
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Pielke has been calling for scientists and those who use scientific data to tone down their rhetoric.
He is not alone. Vicky Pope is the head of Climate Change at the Met Office in Britain, which has been following the weather around the world since 1854.
"News headlines vie for attention and it is easy for scientists to grab this attention by linking climate change to the latest extreme weather event or apocalyptic prediction," Pope recently said on her blog.
"But in doing so, the public perception of climate change can be distorted.
"The reality is that extreme events arise when natural variations in the weather and climate combine with long-term climate change. This message is more difficult to get heard. Scientists and journalists need to find ways to help to make this clear without the wider audience switching off."
Gore's cries of wolf come with ridiculous "proof."
For example, he has blamed mankind for the melting of glaciers. But scientists say 10,000 years ago, one-third of North America was covered in ice.
Perhaps the Flintstones emitted too much carbon dioxide as they drove around Bedrock "courtesy of Fred's two feet."
Some of us have even taken to mocking Gore's constant gloom-and-doom by pretending each snowflake or cold day disproves global warming.
I won't even go into whether global warming is a good thing or bad. I like to think a tropical Antarctica is better than what we have now.
Public skepticism over manmade global warming is a good thing.
Public cynicism, though, is a bad thing. If climate science is distorted by politicians like Gore, the rest of us are misled.
We need to trust in science, not politicians.
In forcing Gore to back down from his preposterous claims, Pielke did us all a favor by standing up for the integrity of science. He is not a denier of anything. He just wants to take politics out of science.
On this, we should all agree.