In the wake of the disaster caused by Tropical Storm Sandy, various allies of the Obama campaign have rushed to claim that the event was caused by anthropogenic global warming, thereby justifying the president’s program of crushing the economy with regressive carbon taxes, a supposedly necessary measure to prevent future bad weather. In fact, there is no scientific basis, either empirical or theoretical, to justify such claims.Weather systems are natural heat engines, and like all other heat engines, both natural and artificial, they are driven not by temperature per se, but by differences in temperature between one location and...