THE BELL CURVE:

Occasionally, I read something in this newspaper that keeps itching my psyche until I finally have to scratch it in print. Like a Forum piece by Chuck Cassity that appeared in the Pilot a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly about global warming. I’m forever fascinated by the citizens — especially public figures like Rep. Dana Rohrabacher — who regard global warming as a scam being run on all of us rational people by left-wing scientists with dubious motives. So I always read what they have to say. And I found that Cassity had an interesting new slant on that issue. The target he was really after was Al Gore.

Global warming just provided Cassity an avenue to expose the real Al Gore. Especially to those of us, including the Nobel Prize committee, who admired Gore’s Academy Award-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” and his efforts to — as the Nobel judges wrote — “build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such changes.”

But it turns out that, according to Cassity, we have all been gulled by Gore.

That includes the Nobel judges, a whole ton of scientists, and many millions of simple folk like me whose knowledge of science is admittedly limited to Biology 101 and who have to depend on more creditable sources to make judgments.

If you have seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” you know Gore didn’t set himself up as a source of this knowledge but rather ascribed it to an impressive list of the world’s finest scientists. In that process, Gore didn’t deny that there are scientists with good credentials who continue to dismiss the threat of global warming. But he also offered many examples pointing out that the contrarians pale in number and stature to those who have joined with scientists all over the world in urging us to start while we still can to cut down on man-made carbon dioxide. Cassity calls this “mass hysteria” and tosses off those issuing the warnings as “sky-is-falling scientists … with something to gain.”

This is a serious charge, and the only example he offered was — you got it — Al Gore. He would have us believe that Gore is pushing global warming because he is chairman of a new company that sells carbon credits. He supports this accusation by telling us that Gore lives in a 20,000-square-foot mansion (not six; just one) and drives a Gulfstream 2 plane car. And then, he closes the deal by comparing Gore’s lifestyle with Renaissance-era kings who bought Papal dispensations for used-up wives.

While striving to connect this odd assortment of dots, he fails to note that Gore has been publicly concerned with global warning for 30 years and wrote a book called “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit” in 1992 — many years before Cassity has him taking up the cause in order to profit from carbon credits.

Global warming is not a political issue nor subject to personal attack. If you are confused about where to come down on it and want to draw your own conclusions, enter “global warming” on the search engine of your computer and get some sense of the issues involved. You might start with the objective overview offered in lay language by the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I faced a similar question some years ago when I was assigned by a national magazine to attempt to reduce to lay language an international debate between chemist Linus Pauling and physicist Edward Teller on the danger of testing atomic weapons in the atmosphere. After spending a day with each of them, my head ached, and as I was packing up my tape recorder, I said to Pauling: “I’ve spent the last two days talking to two Nobel Laureates who have taken diametrically opposite scientific positions on a matter of life and death importance, so who in hell am I supposed to believe?” And Pauling grinned his impish grin and said, “Who did you like the best?”

In a sense, that is what “easily led” laymen like me are reduced to in such highly technical matters as global warming: comparing the depth and stature and number of the credible scientists taking opposite positions, while — despite Pauling’s counsel — leaving personalities strictly out of the mix.

If the catastrophic predictions are even partially accurate and we don’t take protective measures, Cassity’s grandkids will suffer along with mine.

Meanwhile, accusing our finest scientists of deliberately fostering “mass hysteria” by educating us on the imminent dangers of global warming for some unidentified personal gain may play well on right-wing blogs but isn’t very useful for the future of mankind.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.