Yale University Professor Charles Hill is one of the Yale
faculty’s notable polymaths. Before joining the Yale faculty as
diplomat in residence and lecturer in international politics, he
seems to have been everywhere and done everything. His former
student Molly Worthen titled her biography of Professor Hill The
Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost (a book we wrote about here, here
and here). Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried a letter to
the editor by Professor Hill responding to a Journal editorial
on global warming hokum: The fact that the earth’s climate
changes in cycles from warm to cold to warm, etc. (“Hockey Stick
Hokum,” editorial page, July 14) was noted in the late 18th
century by Edward Gibbon in his “Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire”: “The reindeer, that useful animal, is of a constitution
that supports, and even requires, the most intense cold. He is
found on the rock of Spitzberg, within ten degrees of the Pole;
he seems to delight in the snows of Lapland and Siberia; but at
present he cannot