Former vice president and Oscar winner Al Gore is scheduled to testify to both House and Senate committees today about global warming. For the past few years Gore has traveled across America speaking to audiences that range from friendly to worshipful, from journalists in New York and Washington to actors in Hollywood. If he has ever faced skeptical questions, it hasn’t been reported.

We have several times invited the former vice president to present his famous slide show at the Cato Institute, in conjunction with a slide show prepared by Patrick J. Michaels, who takes a more benign view of climate change. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He is the state climatologist of Virginia, a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and an author of the 2003 climate science “Paper of the Year” selected by the Association of American Geographers. His research has been published in major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science. He received his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979. His most recent book is Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, which has been number one on Amazon’s global warming bestseller list for months at a time and has been reprinted twice this year.

Gore’s office has declined our invitations. If Vice President Gore is committed to public understanding of climate change, why will he not demonstrate to a Washington audience composed of both supporters and skeptics that his ideas can carry the day in a dialogue with a leading critic He wiped the floor with Ross Perot; does he fear that the case for catastrophic climate change is not as strong as the case for NAFTA

The invitation is still open. Mr. Vice President, please come to the Cato Institute and present your slide show to an audience of journalists and scholars with a knowledgeable climate scientist also on the dais.