As I watch the Trump White House and its orbiting debris field of oddballs and charlatans, a single long-ago movie scene keeps returning to my mind. In “Annie Hall,” waiting in line in a movie theatre, Woody Allen’s character becomes irritated by a guy behind him, an academic blowhard pontificating to his date about the culture. When he mentions the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, Allen erupts and then, in a delightful spectacle of comeuppance, produces McLuhan himself, who tells the man, “I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. . . . How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” Allen then says, to the camera, “Boy, if life were only like this.”

Every so often, it is. On Tuesday, eighty-six climate scientists delivered a four-hundred-page re

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