In this particular winter, the winter I lived through, (no, I'm not that old!) there were stories of children lost just a few steps from their front doors, frozen, dead and buried in the snow, just as with the great blast of '88.

My, how times have changed! Thursday of last week found climate crusader and inventor of the internet, Albert Gore, Jr., in New York City giving a speech on the horrors of global warming just as New York, and the rest of northeast, was experiencing its coldest weather of the last one hundred years. Temperatures set records from Pennsylvania to Maine with some spots of New Hampshire reaching 40 degrees below zero (that's fahrenheit for those of you living in countries conquered by the French). What was thought to herald a new Ice Age 25 years ago was now credited by Algore to, maybe you've guessed it, "Global Warming!!!"

But what happens when a winter that's warmer than normal comes along? I remember November of l998, just ever so slightly warmer than normal in the northeast. Before the month was out the global warming brigades were already screaming about how they had to wear their bathing suits. That was before the slightly colder than normal temperatures of December balanced things out and gave us a year that was, temperature-wise at least, just about average.

There's another winter that I remember -- l995. I awoke one January morning to a thermometer reading of l0 below zero (that's Fahrenheit for those of you living in countries conquered by the French). By noon, the mercury (yes, thermometers once had that environmentally dangerous mercury in them!) had plummetted to 30 below. That's to within 70 degrees of the current temperature on the surface of Mars. One of my liberal colleagues had waltzed into my office and the discussion turned naturally to the weather.

"Well," he said, "This is just what you would expect with global warming." My jaw went somewhere under my desk. I replied with my usual touch of winsome, boyish innocence. "Gee, Bill, could you explain that to me? I mean, given that the theory claims the Earth is heating up, wouldn't you think that an unusually cold winter is, prima facie at least, disconfirming evidence?"

Being a liberal, my colleague, of course, knew no science. But, then, knowledge and truth matter little to a liberal. Having the right feelings, well, now there's something that really matters! As with most conversations with liberals, my request for some hard evidence to back up his claim brought an end to it. Although, I'm sure that some liberal somewhere has some convoluted, Rube Goldberg explanation of how a warmer Earth results in cooler temperatures.

This whole scenario is a good lesson in the philosophy of science. Here's a theory, global warming, which is apparently compatible with almost every set of weather conditions on the planet. If it's too hot, the cause is global warming. If it's too cold, well, that too is global warming. What if it's somewhere in between? Well, that could be global warming as well. We'll just have to wait and see.

In that regard, Marxism bears a striking similarity to global warming. For example, what could be more obvious than the fact that Marxist economies were brutally disastrous failures, handed counterexamples from the unavoidable school of reality? I pointed this out to a Marxist-sympathizing friend of mine while we were graduate students. "It's no wonder," he said, "With all the capitalist countries that surround them and contaminate their ideology! That's the reason for their only apparent failure!"

So Marxism, like global warming, is another theory compatible even with disconfirming evidence. Philosophers of science refer to such hypotheses as "unfalsifiable." Come to think of it, they're a lot like another kind of claim, one we tell children, about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy. We tell these stories in ways that prevent even the most inquisitive youngster from ever discovering that they're false: "Santa won't come if you're still awake;" "The Easter Bunny is too fast for you to see him;" "The Tooth Fairy is just too silent for you to ever hear her come!" In just the same way as our two adult stories, these claims are unfalsifiable, too.

So, the next time you hear a story about global warming or some other unfalsifiable claim, relax and remember the fairy tales your parents use to tell you. There's really no difference between the two.