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 a longstanding trend. And the longstanding 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 warming as it was becoming apparent that Earth wasn't uniformly warming in line with predictions, "it will not lead to humanity's demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future."

Numbered also among the converts -- the use of........

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