FINALLY – CLIMATE CHANGE EVEN DITTOHEADS CAN UNDERSTAND

I must admit that I stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh. I can’t lie to you; I stopped cold turkey.

When he started slut-shaming a law student because she dared to advocate expanding contraceptive health care coverage, that was the last straw for me. I haven’t listened to him since.

Admittedly, I find tuning Rush out to be almost as difficult as listening to him. I think of him as one of the most evil men in American public life and pride myself on opening my eyes and ears to evil. I’ve forced myself to read Mein Kampf, for crying out loud. If you can do that, you can certainly listen to Limbaugh on AM radio. Compared to Hitler, Rush is a veritable Abraham Joshua Heschel!

It is certainly a goal of mine to be able to stomach Rush enough so that I can listen to him once again. It’s not something I could accomplish today, or probably even for another month or two, but someday, mark my words, I’ll hear him spew hatred again – hatred directed toward anyone and anything who would dare advance a progressive cause.

Clearly, one of those causes is the need to combat climate change. We progressives have spoken about that issuefor many years. We have listened to the scientific community and taken their conclusions at face value, or at least their central conclusions: Climate change is real. It is substantial. It is man made. And it is profoundly dangerous to our species, among others.

We progressives have even dared to suggest that climate change is more important than the short-term economic reports that tend to dominate the news. During an election year, that’s blasphemy. But that’s the way we progressives tend to talk. For that, Rush has termed us “tree huggers” and “environmentalist wackos.”

I remember a couple of years ago, during the so-called Snowmaggedon that dumped literally feet of snow on the Washington, D.C. area, when Rush and the self-proclaimed “:Dittoheads” who love him were laughing at the environmentalist community. We had been talking, you see, about polar icecaps melting and other signs of “global warming,” when in fact, we could plainly see for ourselves what a crock that was. We didn’t even need to go outside – our power was out for days, so we could sit in our own houses in our “liberal suburbs,” and experience global COOLING for ourselves.

Yup, that was one funny joke, wasn’t it? Even the Good Lord must have thought so – he’s the one who dumped the 2 ½ feet of snow on his favorite nation’s capital. Maybe God is a Dittohead after all.

Well, there’s one thing I learned from Snowmaggedon: environmentalists really do need to stop using the term “global warming.” The preferred term is “climate change.” And yes, it does entail some amount of global warming, but part of this phenomenon is that there will always be some areas and some time periods where the weather is unusually cold. That doesn’t disprove the existence of climate change; it reinforces what the scientists are saying. Our addiction to fossil fuels is creating EXTREME weather patterns of various types, and all of those extremes can be disruptive, regardless of whether they involve extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme moisture, or extreme dryness.

I have friends in the energy industry who will acknowledge that climate change is real, but what they have trouble admitting is that there’s anything we need to do about it. The mantra goes something like this: “Mother Nature is powerful. She can take whatever we throw at her.”

Fine. Maybe she can. But at what cost? Just this week, we’ve seen more deaths from the brutal heat, and that’s just here in the USA. I can only imagine all the loss of human and animal life that is being, or soon will be, experienced in East Africa due to desertification. They will bear the brunt of our excesses long before we will. Ironic, isn’t it? We guzzle oil. They die first.

Today, in Rush Limbaugh’s least favorite city (DC), it reached 105. It hit 106 in Indy yesterday. This past winter in Minnesota, it rarely got below 10. Yes folks, this has been one freakily hot year in America – hot enough that even the Dittoheads have to be wondering if “Algore” was right after all. For them, the issue has become a matter of pride and politics. They don’t want the world to warm up because it would mean that the liberals were right, and worse yet, it would mean that some form of collective tampering with the Invisible Hand might be necessary. God forbid, right?

The thing is, though, nobody likes brutal heat. Progressives don’t. Dittoheads don’t. In fact, the Dittoheads might find it especially unbearable. After all, vegans like me should be able to survive several days without power in 100 degree heat. But when you feel compelled as a matter of politics and patriotism to eat tons of beef and pork, this global warming, I mean “climate change,” can get rather challenging.

A few more summers like this, and who knows? We might even see a dip in Rush’s ratings.