Year 3, Month 2, Day 24: Narcissistic Nihilist Edition

USA Today covers the varied sources of influence on climate change opinion, with a special emphasis on the role of a certain drug-addled gasbag:

“I’ve come up with a list of at least ten different reasons that people are confused about climate science. It’s different for each person,” says Texas Tech University climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe, author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions, written with her husband, an evangelical pastor, Andrew Farley.

Hayhoe has learned a lot about politicians and climate in the last two months. In December, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told an Iowa voter, alarmed by something the voter heard mentioned by radio personality and climate science naysayer Rush Limbaugh, that he was dropping a chapter that Hayhoe had written for a book he planned on environmental topics . Alakazam, no more distracting climate science.

The vanishing act for her chapter by Gingrich came as news to Hayhoe. “I’ve never spoken to him and he has never spoken to me,” she said, this week. (The Gingrich campaign did not respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.)

What came next out of the rabbit’s hat was an even bigger surprise. Hate mail. Threats against her and her child. So much that she told the Toronto Globe and Mail that she had lost count of all the angry messages aimed at her, a mother who happened to be a scientist telling people what all the evidence suggests is the truth about their world.

“There’s a pattern of attacking people who speak out on climate change, by figures in the political elite such as Rush Limbaugh, that is almost rehearsed,” Brulle says. “That’s how it works,” he says. “That’s how public opinion on climate is shaped in our country.”

Almost rehearsed, huh? Sheesh. Sent February 19:

It is a peculiar irony that Newt Gingrich, a self-described “historian,” should find his rhetoric on climate change so completely controlled by the right wing’s loudest and least reflective spokesman. Since Rush Limbaugh’s sense of history barely extends to the beginning of the current day’s radio appearance, it’s no wonder that he derides scientists who are thinking in hundred- or thousand-year time spans.

For Mr. Gingrich to excise Katherine Hayhoe’s chapter on climate change from his book is a pathetic capitulation to political exigency. This bow to the power of a proudly ignorant buffoon is one of the most ignominious moments in a career already jam-packed with low points, but as we face what is possibly the single gravest threat human civilization has yet encountered, it’s not just a personal humiliation. Newt Gingrich’s reversal on climate change ensures that the former speaker is truly “on the wrong side of history.”

Warren Senders