Is Climatology a Science?

By Robert Tracinski

I was very surprised to wake up a few days ago to discover three inches of snow on the ground -- in Virginia, in April, while our lilacs were blooming.

Must be that global warming.

It was a perfect concretization of a wisecrack that's been going around for years: we're supposed to believe that climatologists can predict the weather for the whole globe a century from now -- when they still can't predict the local weather for tomorrow.

Behind that wisecrack is a more serious and profound point about the status of climatology as a science. Last year, for example, advertisements for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth featured a hurricane emerging from an industrial smokestack. It was an attempt to cash in on predictions of an unusually heavy hurricane season, allegedly caused by global warming. Yet last summer, hurricane activity precipitously dropped, and not a single hurricane made landfall in the United States.

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