It’s been a cold winter so far in the Midwest and much of the Northeast, early-in-the-season snow even in Washington, D.C., and temperatures falling to freezing and below in much of the South. Come to think of it, North America’s 2024-25 winter was pretty cold, too. It’s gotten to the point that “polar vortex” is a phrase on just about everyone’s lips.

Of course, you are surely aware — as those of us with doubts about inevitably disastrous global warming were often told — that there’s a difference between weather and climate. Weather is anecdote, climate is long-standing trend. And the long-standing trend in climate, we have been told this entire past quarter-century, is toward a hotter climate all over the world, with multiple catastrophic consequences. 

Now, we seem to have reached an Emily Litella moment — the moment when, on the now half-century-old Saturday Night Live program, the befuddled character realized that she had misheard and misinterpreted some anodyne comment and had been propounding an absurd theory, and dismissed it with a hurried “Never mind.”

Playing the Litella role this October was Bill Gates, who, as a mega-philanthropist, makes serious efforts to gauge whether the causes to which he has contributed have been worth the money. Although “climate change will have serious consequences,” he said, using the two-word phrase that replaced global........

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