But it would be a shame for Mr. Pruitt to be allowed to slither back to Oklahoma without everyone appreciating the true magnitude of what he has done. He was a prime voice urging President Trump to abandon the Paris climate deal, the fragile international consensus that we ought not wreck the only planet we have.

During his time in office, Mr. Pruitt has episodically repeated his big lie, always using weasel words — “with precision” — to try to appear more reasonable in the face of the overwhelming scientific consensus about climate change.

When asked on CNBC about the role of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, Mr. Pruitt said: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and analysis.”

But we do know it, no matter how much Scott Pruitt sweats under the television lights as the distortions fall from his lips.

We know in exquisite physical detail what pouring carbon dioxide into the air, something humans are doing with abandon, will do to the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere. We know that the planet is warming at a rate with little known precedent in the geological record and that no natural factor can account for that warming.

Scientists predicted the warming many decades ago, and it is proceeding pretty much as they forecast. They also predicted that glaciers and ice caps would melt, the oceans would rise, rains would intensify, heat waves would get worse — and every bit of that has come to pass. The same scientists are telling us that failing to get emissions under control would be to risk a mass extinction of life on Earth and would be very likely to create so much chaos in the human realm as to imperil the stability of our civilization.