If you want to know the real reason why Al Gore won't run for president in 2008, you can look out your window, assuming you can see anything but blowing snow.

It's a hard sell to stand in 130 inches of snow in upstate New York and get the crowd going when your reason for political existence is your drumbeat against global warming.

Ditto that here, where the Chicago and Northwest Indiana areas this month set all-time records for the number of consecutive days of subzero temperatures.

Al. Do you want an inconvenient truth? Then drop by my place, and you can warm up my car and scrape the ice off the windows for the umpteenth day in a row.

Gore has built global warming into a cottage industry, but the White House isn't a cottage.

To be fair to Gore, there is evidence the earth has recently been going through a warming cycle. The United Nations on Feb. 2 released the summary of its fourth assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You may have understandably have missed the summary because you were busy searching for your butt, which you believed had frozen off on Super Bowl Sunday.

However, while there are the usual conclusions of the potential for cosmic doom, the summary contains reasons for believing prior studies may have gone somewhat overboard in their assessment of climate change, its reasons and its implications.

Yes, the polar ice caps are still retreating but the new study says the eventual sea rise will be from seven to 23 inches, not a 20-foot rise as has found its way into the popular press.

The summary is also less enthusiastic than before in its endorsement of the so-called "hockey stick" speculation that the earth's climate was stable for 1,000 years -- represented by the shaft of the stick -- then spiked upward as represented by the blade.

One can only imagine if Gore was running for president 70,000 years ago at the beginning of the last major ice age.

"I know this is an inconvenient truth, but reactionary forces among us have been secretly suppressing the technology to develop coal-fired energy plants and internal combustion engines. Even as I speak great plates of ice are forming to the far north. The time will come when the bears that now inhabit the region will return to their hunting grounds, only to find they cannot climb the palm trees!"

"Is there no escaping this global cooling?" cries a hunter-gatherer.

"Well, we could wait 70,000 years," the ancestral Gore says. "It's bound to warm up again."

The opinions are solely those of the writer. He can be reached at markk@nwitimes.com or (219) 933-4170.