Get out of the way, I'm next

My house was so hot this morning, I didn’t even have to kill any ants. They usually run across the drainboard when I try to make breakfast, but today they must have loaded up on sugar and bagel crumbs and retired to their ultra-cool ant lounge in the basement.

Or maybe it’s not as hot as it seems. On Friday the eminent climate scientist Rush Limbaugh weighed in on what looks to him like a government conspiracy to convince us climate change is for real:

They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge, Drudge getting sucked in here. Gonna be a 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s going to be a 100, maybe 99. The heat index, manufactured by the government, they tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there. 116 – When’s the last time the heat index was reported as an actual temperature? It hasn’t been. But it looks like they’re trying to get away with doing that now…

Forget for a minute that Limbaugh probably never goes anywhere that isn’t air-conditioned and looks like he hasn’t worked up a sweat in 30 years, and that the humidity level does have a direct affect on how hot you feel unless you’re on narcotics, which can make you more or less oblivious to the weather.

The facts are that we’re heading toward “an irreversible rise in summer temperatures” and much more severe storms “if atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase.” That’s according to a Stanford University study and a thousand other scientific reports and the experience of any sane person who knows not only that summers are getting hotter but that the ice cap at the North Pole is melting.

More facts: This weekend, from the Plains to the East Coast, temperatures are in the upper 90s and 100s. Last year, 28 cities – from Washington, D.C. to Caribou, Maine – set record highs for average temperature from March through August. And, according to the EPA, “The eight warmest years on record (since 1880) have all occurred since 2001, with the warmest year being 2005.” And…

Never mind. The point is that it’s one thing to dispute the causes of climate change and quite another to deny it’s happening. Only frauds do that — meaning Limbaugh and the legion of reporters in the Rupert Murdoch media empire who have tried to suppress the facts.

Headline of the Week: From ThinkProgress, in regard to Limbaugh’s style of climate-change denial: “It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.”