Liberals: Global Warming Is Causing Street Lights to Melt! - Power Line (blog)

It has been a hot summer across much of the United States. Nothing unusual about that, but global warming alarmists, eager as always to parlay ignorance into greater control over the economy, have been quick to attribute every hot day to human-induced global warming. So, when it got so hot in Oklahoma that street lights actually melted, liberals were all over it. Obama administration mouthpiece Think Progress posted the photo below, with these comments:

WOW. It’s so hot in Oklahoma that the streetlights are melting. …

Meanwhile, a senator from Oklahoma, James Inhofe (R), is a major climate denier.

Wow, is that dramatic, or what? It’s gotta be due to CO2! If it gets any hotter, the other side of the street light will melt too!

Other liberals spread the photo of the melting street light on Twitter, and they issued challenges to Sen. James Imhofe, who is a climate realist:

Well-known global warming alarmist Bill McKibben immediately saw the power of the image of the melting street light and tweeted about it:

Well, what can you say? At some point, the evidence is so overwhelming that we deniers will just have to give up the battle. I mean, when it is so hot that street lights are melting…Oh, wait! More information is coming in about that melting street light! It turns out it melted because it was right next to a dumpster fire:

The material in question melts at a temperature of around 266 degrees Fahrenheit. Which, I suppose, explains why the light only melted on one side. The guy who took the photo obviously knew that it was a fraud.

How can liberals be so dumb? I don’t know, but they manage it day after day. There is a sad postscript to this story, however. Yahoo News, which I believe has more readers (or, at least, casual viewers) than any newspaper, picked up the story of the melting street lights in Oklahoma. It reproduced Think Progress’s photo, with the headline: “Oklahoma is so hot that street lamps are melting.” The alleged phenomenon was highlighted on the main Yahoo page, where millions of people presumably saw it:

You would naturally assume that Yahoo picked up this silly story before it was known that the street light melted because of a dumpster fire, not global warming. But no! Yahoo knew the truth, and ran the story anyway. Here is the first paragraph of Yahoo’s story:

It’s hard to not be concerned with global warming when its effects are right in front of your eyes. Sure, it’s one thing when the ocean begins to reclaim islands, but when you can see the effects in your home town, well, that’s another story altogether. Case in point: KFOR TV in Stillwater, Oklahoma is reporting that temperatures are so high that the street lamps have begun melting.

But if you keep reading, you learn that Yahoo knows better:

It’s possible the heat itself isn’t responsible for the event â€Â" it’s being reported on Facebook that a nearby dumpster fire may have been the cause of the melting plastic light housings. Still, that dumpster fire was caused and aggravated by the record heat and dryness. And if dangerous, spontaneous fires aren’t reason enough to go green, we don’t know what is.

Is there evidence for the assertion that the “dumpster fire was caused and aggravated by the record heat and dryness?” Of course not. Is there evidence for the assertion that this was a “dangerous, spontaneous fire”â€"as opposed to one started, for example, with a match? No. The bottom line is that if you are a believer in government control over the economy (which is to say, over every aspect of our lives) evidence is simply irrelevant. Anthropogenic global warming isn’t a scientific theory at all; it is a political campaign, and one in which many media outlets are eager to join, regardless of the facts.

Via Watts Up With That and Tom Nelson, both of whom you should read.