RUSH: Laurie in Las Cruces, New Mexico, nice to have you with us. I’m glad you waited. Appreciate your patience. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks! This is so exciting. I haven’t talked to you since your local show in New York, so I am just thrilled right now.
RUSH: Well, did you used to live in New York and you moved?
CALLER: I used to live in New Jersey. We’re recent escapees to the Southwest.
RUSH: Well, congratulations. I hope you like rocks and barren countryside.
CALLER: We love it. It’s great. There’s also really beautiful weather and nice people, and we’re really happy here.
RUSH: I couldn’t be happier that you’re happy. I love when you people are happy.
CALLER: Look, you were talking about the drought in the Southeast, and I had to call you, because I thought of you when I read an article in USA Today about ten days ago. They were talking about the southeast drought being caused by two years of weak tropical storm cycles. The article didn’t say anything about global warming, but if you think about it, just exactly two years ago, all these newspapers were telling us after Katrina that global warming was just going to bring us incredibly powerful storms for the next decade, that the Southeast was going to be washed out by now, and the only thing I can think is that global warming is just not doing its job. We’re supposed to have all this water and instead we have drought. And yet people are still blaming the drought on global warming, which may be is true if you look at it from the point of view that global warming is not doing what it’s supposed to. But it’s making my head spin anyway, so I just wanted to point it out to you.
RUSH: Well, I appreciate that. I’m always thrilled to be thought of, especially when you’re reading USA Today. That’s certainly not what they intend. And the fact that you think of me even when reading USA Today, you have made my day.
CALLER: Oh, thanks, Rush.
RUSH: But let me tell you something here, Laurie, about all of this. The thing that’s very simple to take away from these last two years, be there a drought, and for whatever reason they want to tell us, the bottom line is they don’t know! They just don’t know. The evidence is that after Hurricane Katrina, they predicted ten straight years of such storms and even more intense storms because of global warming. In these next two years, we’ve had a total of ten storms, and not all of them have become hurricanes and not all of them have hit the US coastline. In fact, this one is lurking out there in the Caribbean; it looks like it’s going to miss the US coastline. It’s just a tropical storm. So the bottom line is they’re wrong. They don’t know. So if they predict ten years of incredibly massive storms on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, and we get two years of ten puny little storms — well, two Cat Fives that went down to Mexico and the Yucatan peninsula, they don’t know what they’re talking about, whether it’s global warming, whether it’s the drought — I mean if they start speculating that the drought is because of a weaker-than-expected tropical storm season, well, I could understand that. There’s less rain when you have no tropical storms.
To show you how seductive this global warming thing and how effective — actually it is seductive, it is effective, but there is still so much doubt, there’s so much common sense on the part of people that are rejecting some of this. But when you have a movement that blames every extreme on global warming, and then takes every unusually strong storm or extremely long drought or what have you, and calls it extreme, without any historical context or perspective… you know, people want to matter. The root of this global warming stuff being successful with the people it is successful with is the fact that people want to matter. I mean, a lot of people feel like they’re just ants in one of those ant farms that you put on top of the TV. They’re running around, and they’re climbing up hills and they’re falling down hills, and they’re doing things, and everybody wants meaning in their lives. And too many Americans think that meaning in their lives equals fame. If you’re famous, if you do anything that brings fame to you, then all of a sudden your life has meaning, because then after you become famous, you can start waxing eloquent on all these cause-related things because you care about people, and you can say the stupidest, most inane, inaccurate things in the world, but, at the end of the day, you will feel great about yourself and you will love yourself because you’ve cared.
Well, everybody wants their lives to have meaning. They want to matter. Here comes global warming. What is the root of global warming? That man, particularly American man and American woman, are destroying the planet. Well, threatening the climate of the planet, and we’re doing it with a reckless disregard for frugality. We’re doing it with a reckless disregard for our environment. We are selfishly usurping resources that belong to others. We are wasting them and they destroy everything that they touch, and in the process we can’t renew these because these are nonrenewable, and we feel guilty. Therefore, when somebody comes along and says you can amend your ways, you can absolve yourself of this sin by accepting this, then all of a sudden someone whose life doesn’t matter, becomes life that matters to them. ‘I care about global warming. I’m important. You’re not. I’m driving a Prius, and you’re not. You’re driving this gas hog. I care more.’ It’s the same thing as wearing these ribbons. Everybody wants to be noticed, and everybody wants to matter, and everybody wants their lives to have meaning. And, sadly, too many people seek the meaning in their life as a result of feedback from others. And ergo, that’s where you get this preoccupation and desire with fame, particularly on the part of young skulls full of mush, put with the global warming thing, it’s made to order.
Who can be against clean air? Who can be against clean water? Who can be for the polar bears dying? Who could be for any of these things that they claim are happening? So it’s very seductive, and I think that despite that, despite all the destructiveness, despite the 25-year head start these people have had, there are still a whole lot of doubters out there. This has not taken hold. We’re going to beat this back. I will never forget the story that these two researchers did from — I forget where. It’s in the website archives at my website. These guys studied media since the late 1800s. Every 25 to 30 years, the media goes out and finds experts that are predicting either global warming or global cooling, and it never fails. It’s always an issue that’s out there. On the science side it’s really about nothing more than getting grants and earning a living, but, with the people, they just want to matter. People don’t want to be nondescript; they don’t want to be invisible, in their own minds, so global warming and other social causes, by supporting them and shouting about them, proselytizing about them, people can make themselves feel like they matter. That’s really, I think, the one thing here that people misunderstand in terms of why so many people buy into it, because they’re not looking at the science of it. It’s pure psychological and emotional in a certain sense.