Thursday, July 21, 2011

Rush Limbaugh Says Heat Index Is A Government Plot

Spinning a conspiracy theory that puts his listeners’ lives at risk, Rush Limbaugh argued that government warnings of life-threatening heat are “playing games” with climate change:

They’re playing games with us on this heat wave, again. Even Drudge. Drudge getting sucked in here. Going to be 116 in Washington. No, it’s not. It’s gonna be like 100, maybe 99. A heat index, manufactured by the government to tell you what it feels like when you add the humidity in there.


Rush Limbaugh

“We have this every year,” Rush claimed, after arguing that former vice president Al Gore could cancel the heat wave by scheduling a “global warming conference.”

Limbaugh is dangerously wrong.

This record-shattering heat wave is part of a year of extremes, with a winter and spring of record precipitation in the northern half of the country, and record drought and heat in the southern half.

The record warmth baked the Great Plains, and is now expanding over the flood-soaked ground of the Midwest and Northeast, drenched by record precipitation over the winter and spring. That added moisture is creating the uniquely dangerous heat wave hitting the East Coast.

The combination of heat and humidity in the heat index is no government conspiracy — researchers have found that sickness and mortality go up sharply when the heat index gets above 95.

This is no ordinary summer — in July alone, record high temperatures have been recorded 1,279 times. This is no ordinary year. This is no ordinary decade. The climate is changing, because of the pollution of hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gases from burning coal and oil.

Read more @ Record Heat Wave Gripping Central U.S.

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