From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, August 30, 2005 3:43 P.M. EDT

Wrath Without God?
In 1998 the city fathers of Orlando, Fla., decided to hang rainbow flags from lampposts in honor of Disney World's "gay day." Zany televangelist Pat Robertson issued an admonition: "I would warn Orlando that you're right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don't think I'd be waving those flags in God's face if I were you."

Say what you will about the secular left, at least its adherents aren't prone to such superstitions. Or are they? In today's Boston Globe, a column by Ross Gelbspan blames hurricane Katrina on the wrath of--well, whatever you call a vengeful higher power in the absence of God:

The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.

When the year began with a two-foot snowfall in Los Angeles, the cause was global warming.

When 124-mile-an-hour winds shut down nuclear plants in Scandinavia and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and the United Kingdom, the driver was global warming.

He goes on in this vein, blaming "global warming" for all unpleasant weather, even cold weather that hasn't happened yet:

As a Bostonian, I am afraid that the coming winter will--like last winter--be unusually short and devastatingly severe. At the beginning of 2005, a deadly ice storm knocked out power to thousands of people in New England and dropped a record-setting 42.2 inches of snow on Boston.

The conventional name of the month was January. Its real name is global warming.

Over on the Puffington Host, one Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoes the point:

Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence. . . . Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and--now--Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

The gratuitous nod to antiwar hysteria almost makes us think this guy is related to the senior senator from Massachusetts.

A dose of reality comes from (of all places) the New York Times, which notes that severe hurricanes are simply a fact of life:

Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.

But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.

From 1970 to 1994, the Atlantic was relatively quiet, with no more than three major hurricanes in any year and none at all in three of those years. Cooler water in the North Atlantic strengthened wind shear, which tends to tear storms apart before they turn into hurricanes.

In 1995, hurricane patterns reverted to the active mode of the 1950's and 60's. From 1995 to 2003, 32 major hurricanes, with sustained winds of 111 miles per hour or greater, stormed across the Atlantic. It was chance, Dr. Gray said, that only three of them struck the United States at full strength.

Even if the Bible is a work of fiction, it debunks all this "global warming" hysteria. That the authors of Genesis were able to come up with the story of Noah and the flood proves that rotten weather predated by thousands of years the dawn of the Industrial Age.

Après Katrina, le Déluge
That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. post we cited in the first item ends on an ugly note:

In 1998, Republican icon Pat Robertson warned that hurricanes were likely to hit communities that offended God. Perhaps it was [Gov. Haley] Barbour's memo that caused Katrina, at the last moment, to spare New Orleans and save its worst flailings for the Mississippi coast.

It now appears as though Katrina did not "spare" New Orleans. The Washington Post reports:

Hurricane Katrina and its rains have passed, but this city is filling with floodwaters.

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

Water levels in Lake Pontchartrain and the connecting 17th Street Canal are normally six feet higher than the surrounding city. The levees keep the waters from flowing down into this low-lying city, much of which is below sea level.

The damage to the 17th Street Canal and its levee means that the water from Lake Pontchartrain is now free to flow down to inundate hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings here.

Reuters reports that "New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told television station WWL that 80 percent of the city was under water, and authorities declared martial law in some areas." As one who's enjoyed listening to jazz while sipping a mint julep in the French Quarter, we hope for the best for this city, which is one of America's most charming and also its most vulnerable.

Point Gun at Foot, Shoot
Now this is just nuts. From the Associated Press:

The ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that will consider John Roberts' nomination to the Supreme Court says he intends to ask him what he thinks about a Justice Department memo that critics say led to torture in foreign prisons.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said he gave Roberts a copy of the so-called "Bybee memo" during a meeting Monday.

"It will be raised, partly on the question of to what area--if any--can a president be considered above the law," Leahy told reporters.

Roberts has not served in the executive branch since 1993, so he has nothing to do with this memo. Since issues related to the memo are highly likely to come before the Supreme Court, Roberts easily can, and probably is duty-bound to, refuse to answer questions about it.

So what possible purpose could Leahy's asking Roberts about this serve, other than to remind Americans that the Democrats are the Be Kind to al Qaeda Party?

In Your Heart, You Know He's Wrong in His
The New York Times brings more good news on the Iraqi constitution:

For all their anger, the Sunnis are less unified and organized than the Kurds and Shiites who approved the constitution, Sheik [Ghazi al-]Yawar [a vice president and Sunni leader from Mosul] said, and are unlikely to defeat it. For the constitution to fail, two-thirds of the voters in at least three provinces must vote against it, but Sheik Yawar said he believed that Sunnis could muster a two-thirds vote only in Anbar, a volatile province west of Baghdad.

For that reason, Sheik Yawar said, he thought the wisest course for the Sunnis, who suffered politically after they largely boycotted the last round of elections in January, would be to focus on getting a bigger turnout at the polls in December.

"My heart says no," Sheik Yawar said of his feelings about how to vote in the constitutional referendum. "My mind says yes, because we have to move along."

Blogger John Hinderaker reports that Alhayat, an Arabic-language Iraqi paper, finds in a new poll that 88% of Iraqis plan to take part in the October referendum.

Metaphor Alert
"Tim, it doesn't matter. We're there. We lanced the boil. We're there. We have Salafist penetration into this situation in a very-hard core Sunni insurgency in a critical point in the Middle East, where if it goes south, if we get a civil war between Sunnis and Shias, international markets will be affected. Our role as an international leader will be affected. We'll have a huge strategic problem. So having pushed Humpty Dumpty off the wall, which I would agree was untimely, the Pottery Barn rule applies. We have got to leave this as a stable situation. We cannot afford to pull out here prematurely."--retired general Montgomery Meigs, "Meet the Press," Aug. 28

The Plame Kerfuffle, Solved!
"Gas Station Owner Pleads Guilty in Leak"--headline, Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, Aug. 30

By Popular Demand
In response to our item yesterday about a spat between feminists and environmentalists over a sexy ad discouraging the use of turtle eggs as an impotence treatment, several readers wrote asking to see the ad. As always, we're happy to oblige. If you're not offended by the female form, click here.

The Terrible Tooth About America
The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell explains how good teeth go bad:

Several years ago, two Harvard researchers, Susan Starr Sered and Rushika Fernandopulle, set out to interview people without health-care coverage for a book they were writing, "Uninsured in America." They talked to as many kinds of people as they could find, collecting stories of untreated depression and struggling single mothers and chronically injured laborers--and the most common complaint they heard was about teeth.

Gina, a hairdresser in Idaho, whose husband worked as a freight manager at a chain store, had "a peculiar mannerism of keeping her mouth closed even when speaking." It turned out that she hadn't been able to afford dental care for three years, and one of her front teeth was rotting. Daniel, a construction worker, pulled out his bad teeth with pliers. Then, there was Loretta, who worked nights at a university research center in Mississippi, and was missing most of her teeth. "They'll break off after a while, and then you just grab a hold of them, and they work their way out," she explained to Sered and Fernandopulle. "It hurts so bad, because the tooth aches. Then it's a relief just to get it out of there. The hole closes up itself anyway. So it's so much better."

People without health insurance have bad teeth because, if you're paying for everything out of your own pocket, going to the dentist for a checkup seems like a luxury.

The British, of course, have socialized medicine, which we guess explains why they have such great teeth.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Thomas Dillon, Doug Levene, Michael Segal, Skip King, Alisa Duncanson, C.E. Dobkin, Ron Ackert, Ryan Hurey, Mordecai Bobrowsky, Dan O'Shea, Ed Lasky, Bill Crawford, Patrick Price, Tim Hughes, David Skurnick, Tom Lauck, Jose Carbonell, David Rule and Fred Hansen. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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