The right wing web site Politico posted a news article reporting that Rush Limbaugh, on his radio show, ranted to his listeners about how the whole “polar vortex” phenomenon was just made up this past week to try and explain the sudden cold snap across the eastern USA by climate scientists who are just trying to protect all the lavish grant monies they get for lying to people about global warming and global climate change.
Rush Limbaugh on Monday accused the media and liberals of creating the polar vortex to “lie” to the public about the “hoax” of climate change and global warming.
The conservative radio host told his listeners that “the left, the media, everybody” came up with “this phrase called the ‘polar vortex’” to connect the current cold weather conditions around the country to “the global warming agenda.”
“We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country,” he said, according to a transcript. “And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’ The dreaded polar vortex.”
Limbaugh said liberals are “in the middle of a hoax, they’re perpetrating a hoax, but they’re relying on their total dominance of the media to lie to you each and every day about climate change and global warming.”
“So they created the polar vortex, and the polar vortex, something’s happened, and that cold air which normally stays is in the North Pole, something’s happening, something deeply mysterious and perhaps tragic is happening,” Limbaugh said.
…
Note that Politico presents Rush’s diatribe without any effort to do the most minimal journalism and note that every word coming out of his mouth is an easily refuted lie.
The comments are of course filled with both those pointing out Rush’s lies, and the climate change denialists and dittoheads, who are literally frothing at the mouth because a few days of cold weather in the middle of winter PROVES there is no global warming.
Really sort of amazing how long this thread is, and it appears (perhaps I missed it) no one has pointed out the salient actual facts.
1. The waters of the Pacific have been unnaturally warmed. The northern Pacific right now is experiencing record high water temps, never seen since we have been keeping records.
2. These record high water temps in the northern Pacific have disrupted the the normal seasonal path of the jet stream, and pushed it far to the north.
3. The jet stream has disrupted the polar vortex (a term in use since the 1970’s, but of course facts have NEVER prevented Rush Limpbaugh from running off at his pie hole).
4. This disruption has contributed to pushing cold polar area south over Canada and eastern USA, while at the same time RAISING temperatures around the north pole, further contributing to destruction of the polar ice cap.
5. Meanwhile, and I note Rush did not follow up with this new item, in Australia it is summer, and the counter is roasting under daily record high temps as high as 122 degree F (50 C). The country is quite literally burning to a crisp. It is not normal.
The Australians are realizing right now that they are dealing RIGHT NOW with the fallout of global warming, which is a simple fact. The past year was for the most part in every part of the globe the warmest on record since 1880’s, when modern record keeping began.
How bad is it? Updated report from January 9th from down under:
09 January 2014
Tens of thousands of dead bats have fallen from the sky as a “catastrophic” heatwave hits parts of eastern Australia.The RSPCA estimated that 100,000 could have died from heat exhaustion in record temperatures in southern Queensland.
Spokesman Michael Beatty says the heatwave was a significant blow to the population of bats across the state.
“The heatwave was basically a catastrophe for all the bat colonies in south-east Queensland,” he said.
“That’s obviously going to have a pretty disturbing impact on those colonies and those colonies are vital to our ecosystem.”
The animals’ corpses rot quickly in the heat and councils have organised collections to stop the stench.
Since Christmas, record temperatures of up to 48C have been seen across Australia, hot on the heels of the country’s hottest year on record.
It’s raining bats: 100,000 rotting carcasses fall from the sky during Australian heatwave
Of course because of the effect on the jet stream, the parts of the USA east of the Mississippi were the ONLY part of the globe NOT to experience record high temperatures.
Check out this map of November 2013 global temperatures. The whole world experienced the hottest November on records. Except for the eastern United States, and a couple of other small areas around the globe.
Last month was the warmest November since modern temperature record keeping began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced today in its latest State of the Climate report, which summarizes climate-related news from around the world.
With a combined land and ocean surface temperature of 56.6 degrees Fahrenheit, November 2013 also was the 345th consecutive month – and the 37th November in a row – with a global temperature higher than the 20th century average, the NOAA report added.
Higher-than-average monthly temperatures were reported on nearly every continent around the world, including much of Europe and Asia, coastal Africa, Central America and central South America, as well as in the North Atlantic Ocean, southwest Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean.
Russia experienced its warmest November since national weather records began in 1891, as some parts of the country like Siberia and the Arctic islands in the Kara Sea recorded temperatures more than 14 Fahrenheit degrees higher than the monthly average.
So of course, for all those living in the eastern USA, it is just obvious that there cannot be any real global warming.
This gives whole new meaning to the concept of NOT IN MY BACKYARD. The problem here is the narrow, tunnel vision that makes people refuse to look beyond their own immediate experience of the last five minutes, and look at the actual, global facts and science.
And that ignorance is killing us, and the planet. I honestly would be willing to bet good money that 2/3 or more of Americans literally do not know that when it is winter in America, the other southern half of the planet is experiencing summer. Seriously. I wonder if there has been any polling on this specific example of ignorance.
Updated with word that Al Roker basically told Rush Limbaugh to “stuff it” regarding his Polar Vortex is made up lie.
Roker got the last word on the “polar vortex” controversy Wednesday morning when he pulled out an old college textbook from 1959 that contained a term ID for the weather condition.
“Let me tell you something,” he said on “Today.” “We’ve never used the phrase ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ in conjunction with this… Okay?! So for all the doubters out there, STUFF IT.”
He later tweeted at Limbaugh, who called the polar vortex a “hoax” on Monday:
“Rush Limbaugh claims the Polar Vortex is a creation of a left-wing, liberal media conspiracy. It’s Meteorology 101. No political agenda”
And if that were not enough, there is a reference from a 1913 text using the phrase.
… thus showing the predominance of west winds in the upper regions, confirming the polar vortex theory of Ferrel and the early observations of lofty clouds.
Which confirms once again that Rush Limpbaugh is a big, fat liar. Which was already well known, but this is just icing on top of a many layered cake. If there is any “agenda”, it is that that Rush is being paid to push climate change denial by his right wing corporate paymasters. Right now, given the exodus of nearly 3,000 major advertisers from his show in the two years since he attacked a female college student as a slut on his show, those under the counter payments are probably the only thing keeping his show afloat as the right wing disinformation mill that it is.
Robert Greenwald, who released the film “Koch Brothers Exposed”, suggests this seems highly likely from what research uncovered about the Koch brothers’ support of the Right Wing agenda.
