Like the vagaries of the weather itself, true believers in man-caused global warming twist with the wind as challenges to their beliefs blow by.  For example, I recently pointed out to a graduate of a large, well-respected university that one of the highly credentialed, long-time professors in the university’s atmospheric sciences department was an outspoken skeptic of disastrous anthropogenic global climate change.  The graduate promptly responded by informing me that it was well-known that this professor was off  medication, literally “nuts,” and this is why the professor was outspoken (even to the point of maintaining a popular contrarian website) regarding the fantasy that humans are not likely to have much culpability for cataclysmic climate change.

So, doing some twisting myself, I suddenly realized how much sense this argument made.  Professors who believe that they can confidently predict the global climate decades from now are on medication.  When they go off their medication, they start to think differently.  Other professors, still medicated, notice this independent thinking and become upset.  (After all, settled science must not tolerate unsettled thinkers.)  The flustered faculty, finding the uncomfortable situation a tough pill to swallow, cast aspersions on their antiseptic colleague, calling them nuts, off their medication, and the like, trying to shame the colleague back on sedation.  Ultimately, the true-believer professors simply resort to shunning their loose-cannon colleague and go on with the palliative knowledge that climate will be calamitous as long as humans continue to live comfortably.

For the status quo, all’s well that ends well, even if the college climate doesn’t.

Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist, is author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail, soon to be released by Stairway Press.