RUSH: We had a call and the caller chickened out, the caller hung up, the caller did not have the guts to ask the question directly. I get a one-line advisory about whatever the caller wants to talk about, and this guy wanted to know how can you square pollution with global warming or something. Snerdley said he said, ‘Well look, big fan of yours, listens to you all the time –‘ of course; who doesn’t? ‘– he’s got a problem with your stand on global warming. He lives in Boston. Since the 1900s –‘ how many cars did he say? Okay, 400% increase in what period of time? Not that it matters, but okay, ‘400% increase in the number of cars since the early 1900s,’ I think it would be more than that, but regardless. His point was, ‘Look, I live in Boston and you can see the pollution. You can see the haze.’
Look it, my friends, of course you can, but it’s not all generated by automobiles. If it were there would be smog levels in LA every day and they’d be consistent, because the cars are there every day, they would be constant and they would increase as more and more people buy cars, regardless of our emission efforts. I’ve lived in New York City. A lot of the haze that you are seeing, and it happens in the summertime — how often do you see this haze in the winter, by the way? You know, I do a lot of flying, ladies and gentlemen, and I flew back from New York on Wednesday, we got out of there, and it was overcast a little bit. It wasn’t precipitating. But the whole way back down the East Coast — we skimmed the East Coast on the way down so the satellite reception doesn’t lose, we don’t take the shortcut out over the Atlantic, we skim the coast, and you look down, it was a clear night most of the way down, there wasn’t any haze out there, it was as clear as could be and the same number of cars that were there last summer are down there now. Have you ever noticed if you live in an area with hot, muggy summers, and even some of this that happens in the spring and the fall, have you ever noticed what happens after a cold front goes through? Poof! It’s as clear as a bell.
I heard this rigmarole when I lived out in Sacramento. When I lived out in Sacramento the environmentalist wackos would call me and say, ‘Rush, you know, 20, 30 years ago you go out there on I-80 on the way up the hill to Lake Tahoe and you could see the snow caps up there on the Sierra Nevada,’ and on certain days you still could, but there were still the same number of cars. I don’t deny that cars are polluting. A lot of what you’re seeing is an ozone inversion, it’s not auto pollution. A lot of haze is low level ozone. Ozone is an atmospheric gas, as we all know, but sometimes there’s an inversion, and that’s when they give the old people and people with respiratory problems these advisories, ‘Don’t go outside.’ There’s ozone out there, and ozone is made by the sun. Ozone is not made by automobiles. Now, folks, don’t misunderstand here. I am not denying that the things that we do pollute. What I’m telling you is we do a better job of cleaning up our messes than anywhere else in the world that is as industrialized as we are. But something very simple. You’ve got pollution, you got ozone, you’ve got mugginess, you’ve got haze. How about Nat Cole, 1965, (signing) ‘Roll out the lazy, hazy, crazy…’ In 1965 they’re singing about the haze.
It’s a common factor in the summertime. It’s called ozone! In 1965 we hadn’t even heard of these global warming nutcases. They were on the verge then of talking about global cooling and a new ice age. (singing) ‘Roll out the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.’ You know, what happens here, folks, is very simple, and I know that the leftists in this audience and the Drive-Bys that hear this are gonna chalk up what I’m going to say next as perfect evidence that Limbaugh is just a simpleton, but I’m just observing. What happens is that a cold front comes through, generally has rain, and rain washes out the dirt in the sky. It’s just amazing. Now, I maintain to you people — this is a little common sense here — and of course I’m going to get confirmation from this from our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama at Huntsville. If all of our smokestacks and if all of our automobiles and if all of our whatever else that we do that pollutes, if all of our cows’ methane is responsible for this, it would be there every day and nothing would get rid of it because we are supplying it every day.
I have been in Southern California on days where it’s clear as a bell, you have to look hard to see the smog. I’ve seen days where it’s just impossible to see anything because of the smog. Trees produce some of the ingredients that make smog, not just automobiles. I’ve seen this. But what you need to ask yourself is how the hell can it ever clear up, then? I know what you’re going to say. ‘Rush, Mother Nature trying, Mother Nature’s trying. She’s trying to get back to the way it was before we destroyed the environment, but Mother Nature can’t keep up with us anymore. Eventually our automobiles start –‘ wrong, folks. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. We have not that kind of power. If it didn’t clear up, if those days of haze didn’t ever vanish, then maybe we could talk. You people so concerned about all this, you just need to apply a little common sense, and you need to drop some of the vanity and some of the arrogance.
We are just human beings. We are equal opportunity residents of this planet. We have every right to be here and use our intelligence as we see fit with good stewardship. We are the only living organisms on this planet that can plan, that can think, that can adjust. Everything else is living on the basis of instinct, evolution, adaptation, or what have you. Like my little cat. You know I love my little cat, Punkin. Cats have been domesticated for 10,000 years. There’s an argument raging over whether we domesticated the cat or whether the cat domesticated itself by just walking into the house one day and staying. But regardless, my little cat, not every day, but more often than not, I feed the little cat two or three times a day, I put the food in a bowl, and if I watch the cat eat, if I watch Punkin eat, she will, after she finishes, start moving dirt over her food to hide it from other animals. What she’s doing is scratching the carpet, a perfectly fine carpet when I got her. She’s scratching the carpet, I’m looking at her, saying, ‘Punky, nobody’s going to take your food.’ What an idiot, she doesn’t know what I’m saying. And she doesn’t know what she’s doing.
She thinks she’s still out there in the prehistoric age protecting her food from predators. She’s not thinking about it, it’s just instinct. So, they do what they do, we do what we do. We have stewardship, we have dominance because we’re smarter. We walk upright, we talk, they don’t. I know, some of you pet owners think that you — and they may, I don’t want to get into that, but you know what I’m talking about here. See, this gives us all kinds of vanity, we go out and capture King Kong, wow, we are powerful, we can create a nuclear bomb, wow, we are powerful, and we’re dangerous. We can invent giant airplanes that defy what appears to be logic. They weigh gazillions of tons, and they fly in the air. People don’t stop to think, it requires a lot of speed for that to happen, but nevertheless — so we can do all these things, we must be destroying the planet. If we wanted to, we don’t know how to do it. We don’t know how to get rid of the ozone at street level that we didn’t cause. I get so worn out going through all this, because it’s just common sense, and you need to have a little humility to answer these questions, common sense and humility, drop the vanity and drop the arrogance. Some of you people that believe this rotgut amaze me.
On the one hand, you think we’re no different than a rat, no different than a dog, no different than a cat, no different than a cow. On the other hand, we are so invincible we can destroy a planet whose creation we cannot even explain. We look into the sky at night, we see the stars. We’re lost. It takes faith, being agnostic, being an atheist, or being a person of devout religious belief, it still takes faith when you look up there and try to understand it because you can’t prove it. This notion that we can destroy the planet, this notion that automobiles — I refuse to believe that a God that creates this kind of beauty would create human beings with the ability to destroy the planet while enhancing their lives, while improving their lives, while expanding their life expectancy. That’s not the God that I know. ‘Rush, you are bringing religion in.’ So are they. The global warming crowd is nothing but religion. They just have a different god. It’s either a tree, it’s a mountain, a hummingbird, you know, whatever the hell they choose to worship. They can’t prove what they believe, either. Although they try to make you think that they can.
A couple sound bites on this. And I’m really worried. I know Chad Myers. I’ve met Chadley two or three times. Chad’s a great meteorologist, and he works at CNN, but perhaps not for long. By the way, did you know that CNN, in a massive round of budget cuts, closed down their global warming unit? Miles O’Brien, who used to run their space unit, they got rid of Miles and when Miles went, all this hoity-toity baloney about global warming went with it. The Weather Channel, owned now by NBC, got rid of their global warming climate change unit — why? It must be there wasn’t much of an audience for all the documentaries and specials they were doing. They just zapped them. So last night CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight, weatherman Chad Myers was on. Dobbs said, ‘Chadley, you seeing anything here that directly is tied to something called global warming, fossil fuels, manmade? Which is the dominant influence overall on weather, is it cycles, solar sunspots, solar flares, the 11-year cycle, is that dominate? What’s dominant in terms of influencing the weather?’
MYERS: To think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant. Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big. I think we’re going to die from a lack of freshwater or we’re going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure. But this is like, you know, you said in your career. My career’s been 22 years long. That’s a good career in TV, but talking about climate, it’s like having a car for three days and saying, this is a great car. Oh, yeah, it was for three days, but maybe in day five, six, and seven it won’t be so good and that’s what we’re doing here, we have a hundred years’ worth of data, not millions of years that the world’s been around.
RUSH: I know that this is at CNN, it was on Lou Dobbs last night. The only saving grace was that it was on Lou Dobbs and not in a weather forecast. But this is Chadley Myers. But Chadley, we do have a historical data, not records, but we can go back and look, we can see when the earth was frozen, see what happened to dinosaurs, we have a lot of data beyond a hundred years that shows all kinds of warming and cooling cycles, that had nothing to do with whatever humanity at the time was doing. Also, on Lou Dobbs, he’s got Jay Lehr, who is the science director of the Heartland Institute. He said, ‘Jay, we’ve been around a little over, by scientific estimates, 4.5 billion years. What’s your thought about the dominant influence on the weather?’
LEHR: Clearly, Lou, it is the sun, but if we go back in really recorded human history, in the thirteenth century we were probably seven degrees Fahrenheit and warmer than we are now, and it was a very prosperous time for mankind. If we go back to the Revolutionary War, 300 years ago, it was very, very cold. We’ve been warming out of that cold spell from the Revolutionary War period, and now we’re back into a cooling cycle. The last ten years have been quite cool, and right now I think we’re going into cooling rather than warming. And that should be a much greater concern for humankind, but all we can do is adapt. It is the sun that does it, not man.
RUSH: Shazam, shazam. And anybody with common sense would realize it has to be the sun. By the way, Chadley, we’re going to die from old age, natural causes, before we get killed by ocean acidification or lack of freshwater. Just my prediction. So the sun is causing it. Sun has to be the major factor. You don’t believe me, imagine waking up tomorrow morning, turning on the news and hearing the sun mysteriously went out. We’re dead, folks, if that ever happened, we’re dead. You want to talk about warming. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Nick in Salisbury, Maryland. Nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Mr. Limbaugh. How you doing?
RUSH: Oh, by the way, this is the guy who hung up. Your phone died I’m told now.
CALLER: Yeah, right.
RUSH: You wanted to talk to me about cars and pollution and how can I be so —
CALLER: Yeah. Exactly.
RUSH: Give it your best shot. I answered your question, but you have a follow-up I’m told, yes.
CALLER: Well, you had an excellent line on that and I appreciate that because I’m a fan of yours, and what I got to tell you is —
RUSH: Hang on just a second. My friends, while I appreciate all of you who call and say ‘I’m a big fan,’ it’s not that unique anymore to be a big fan, so don’t expect extra credit for telling me you’re a big fan. Now, what was it you were saying?
CALLER: Well, I said, you said we don’t have the power to affect anything on the earth as humans.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: Right?
RUSH: Nope. I said we don’t have the power to affect the climate. We cannot steer a hurricane; we can’t stop one; we can’t dissipate one; we can’t create one. We can’t steer a tornado; we can’t stop snowstorms; we can’t stop ice; we can’t stop or start anything like that, nothing of major catastrophic consequence. It’s absurd.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: We can make grass grow with a little, you know, sprinkler.
CALLER: Hang on, we don’t have a button we can push to make things happen, right? But we do have habits, habits that we have that can make things — as far as our habits go, that make things happen — like if I take my roof shingles out back and light them on fire and make a big black smoke go up in the back, what you say if you were my neighbor?
RUSH: I’d say you’re stupid.
CALLER: Right, exactly! So that’s what Algore is saying. He’s saying, you’re my neighbor, and you’re taking your shingles and lighting them on fire.
RUSH: Look at the example you just gave me. Do you know anybody other than fraudulent insurance claims of people setting their shingles on fire?
CALLER: Well, you’ve got other things, the same neighborhood.
RUSH: If you’re going to do an analogy, it has been analogous.
CALLER: Okay, hang on one minute —
RUSH: Here’s the better analogy. Lightning strikes a major forest in Southern California and 250 homes are destroyed and big, black clouds are in the sky. We didn’t do a damn thing, and there’s more pollution there than your shingles or your car. And then a rainstorm comes in, and all the evidence of the smoke is gone.