Bengazi, IRS, AP ... who cares?  These are mere distractions.

Let's not forget the real crises.  We are still facing a catastrophe of global proportions unlike any before in history.  Populations will uproot.  Coastlines will sink.  Water wars will erupt.  Biodiversity will disappear.  Icecaps will liquefy.  Space aliens will conquer.

Nearly 40 years ago, when I was an undergraduate in meteorology at Penn State University, things were quite different.  Back then, the potential crisis for humanity--besides the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War--was the coming of the next ice age and all its attendant misery.

We know now that next-ice-age thing was wrong.  We were mistaken.

After careful reflection and a rechecking of the data, we now know with certainty the truth about the global climate in the decades ahead.  97% of scientists who make their living off of exploring and promoting a human-caused climate-change crisis confirm there is a human-caused climate-change crisis--and it's in the direction of global warming.

Damn the peer-reviewed data over the past 16 years that says otherwise.  Besides, data can always be explained away.  The planet is going to swelter, just you wait!

It's been said that a theory that explains everything, explains nothing.  In the case of human-induced climate change, we have a theory (actually, it's only a hypothesis) that explains everything about the future climate, and that future is bad.

So, if tornado or hurricane frequency or intensity increases (or decreases)... if global temperatures increase (or decrease) by a smidgen... if ice melts at the North Pole (or expands at the South Pole)... if a drought persists in the Midwest (or the Mississippi River floods)... take cover under a solar panel that would save us from inconvenient climate fluctuations.

We're assured that there's a crisis to be managed and dependable federal politicians and bureaucrats are the ones to manage it.  The Environmental Protection Agency is faithfully moving ahead with laws to squelch the climate-changing belch from industries bent on the destruction of mankind--power plants and car makers.  Trust EPA regulators.  They're from the government and they're here to help.  

Just don't get caught in a remote foreign embassy during an important election, don't join a tea party, and don't use the telephone booth at the Daily Planet to make a sensitive call.

Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist specializing in air-pollution issues and supporter of the Cornwall Alliance.  His new book is In Global Warming We Trust: A Heretic's Guide to Climate Science (Telescope Books, 2012).