Seyyed Youssef Tabatabi-nejad, a senior Islamic cleric in Isfahan, Iran, said during his weekly sermon last Friday that women dressing inappropriately is causing climate change.

In his sermon, Tabatabi-nejad urged Iran’s "moral police" to crack down on "improper veiling" and to do everything they can to keep Iran’s population as moral as possible. (Yes, Iran has an undercover police force that is purely dedicated to making sure that people act and dress according to their faith.)

But Tabatabi-nejad is not concerned with long-term issues such as the souls of the women who are not wearing their scarves in the car and taking long romantic walks with their boyfriends in public; he has more immediate concerns.

In his sermon, Tabatabi-nejad announced that his “office had received photos of women next to the dry Zayandeh-run River (a major river that runs through Isfahan), [dressed] as if they were in Europe. It is these sorts of acts that cause the river to dry up.”

You read that right. The environment is not messed up because of greenhouse gases or cow farts. The rivers are drying up because women are dressing immodestly. Someone call up the scientists and let them know that all our environmental problems are really easy to fix -- all of the women in the world just need to start wearing burkas and keep their hair out of sight.

This statement has, surprisingly, been largely accepted by those in Iran; as if a natural cause for rivers drying up is just out of the question.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, an Iranian parliament-in-exile dedicated to bringing about the separation of theological and political law in Iran, has condemned Tabatabi-nejad's statement as a “reflection of the typical mindset of the theocratic regime ruling Iran which is no different than the Culture of Isis.”

There has been no official statement from anyone in Iran about this radical stance on how women wearing shorts causes climate change, but this is sadly not the first time someone's taken this positon.

Back in 2010, Hajjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran at the time, claimed that adultery was the cause of an earthquake that was supposed to hit Tehran that year and level the city. The earthquake never did get there.

It must have found a more promiscuous city to shake down instead.