The global warming hysteria has always been unhappy in its champions. It does well to remember that its very first Goliath was the unctuous and preening Al Gore. Having served as a sidekick and underling to Bill Clinton, and then enduring the lesser humiliation of losing to the man regarded at the time as the dumbest ever to run for President, George W. Bush, Mr. Gore searching about for something to tame his shame, set up as the early chief oracle to the global warming apocalyptics. It’s a mystery to this day how he so swiftly emerged from so complete a debacle to world oracle.

Global Warming was the original denomination, favoured by Mr. Gore and the legions of NGOs, Greenpeacers and their ilk. But it proved too sturdy a framing. It lacked the elasticity so useful when it becomes needful to slide an argument around or twist it to meet contradicting realities. The term was never precise, but neither was it fully malleable. That is why – when the winter snows continued to show up after infallible predications by some we’d never see them again, when glaciers didn’t melt on cue, when polar bears fattened and multiplied – the always agile camp of climate diviners switched to the infinitely accommodating “Climate Change.” Climate Change is a binder you can stuff everything in. Warm, Cold, Hot, Dry, Wind, Drought, Frost and Fry. It says everything and nothing. In fact, it is the perfect synonym that less enlightened generations called Weather. And Weather always happens. It is change itself. Ask any Newfoundlander.

Throughout this piece, however, I’ll stay with the original baptismal designation: Global Warming it is. It is what Gore called it. He put out a fact-parched, overblown, manipulative pseudo-documentary – An Inconvenient Truth (a milestone and pioneer in the hash tagged genre of what we now hear of as Fake News) – and on the back of that PowerPoint agitprop repeated the rewards of a latter-day Copernicus. First, from the coven of molesters and sex fiends, the Academy of Arts and Sciences (sic) he got their highest piece of tinsel, an Oscar. Then from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, arguably, the secular world’s highest honour, a Nobel Peace Prize.

What, really, had he done for either? Reflect first on the Peace Prize. What conflict did he stop or ameliorate? What mediation did he engage in to settle a war, or prevent one? What personal example did he set to elevate and inspire the minds of young people? What sufferings did he endure in the battles against tyranny, or for the enduring causes of individual freedom, or respect for human dignity?