We may have reached a watershed moment in American culture. As I made my morning trek to the LA Times website yesterday, I saw a headline that made me a bit suspicious, “U.S. seems to have largely escaped winter.” I live in the Chicago area, and as a native southern Californian I do not state it too strongly when I say I hate the weather here, and I hate winter more than the other seasons (btw, late summer/early fall is the time to visit Chicago). After three horrible winters it’s been nice to get a reprieve this winter. We actually played golf on January 11! It was mid-50s that day. Crazy.

As I clicked on the piece I was expecting the normal explanations we’ve gotten the last decade or more for abnormal weather, and of course I refer to global warming or “climate change” (as if climates don’t change). I’m fairly well read and have my head stuck in front of a computer all day, but I haven’t seen any such explanations this winter. They may be there, and an internet search might prove that, but as much as I live in the wake of the torrent of daily information, you’d think I’d see this somewhere.

Then I read this piece in the Times, and what do I find? A random act of journalism! The author, one Eryn Brown, tells us that “Scientists said the cyclical cooling in the Pacific Ocean known as La Niña was a likely cause for dry conditions in California and across the nation”;  and not one reference to climate change or global warming, not one. In the LA Times! What makes it more amazing is that she does mention greenhouse gas, but only related to water vapor as it is factually related to the story, not to push the agenda of the alarmists.

Have we reached a time culturally when global warming hysteria is passed us? Probably not, but selling the evidence that global warming is “incontrovertible” is getting harder. I noticed a piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal titled, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” There 16 eminent scientists blow a hole in the global warming hysteria narrative (e.g., there has be no warming for well over 10 years). It is voices like these and the great work organizations like The Heartland Institute are doing that slowly but surely are undermining the credibility of Al Gore and his fans with the American people. The media has uncritically played along with the hype for too many years, so it’s nice to see the Times, and hopefully other organs of such profound influence, take a more balanced approach to the intricacies of our incredibly complex global climate.