Expert: Philip Stahl - 12/22/2008

Question
Dr. Stahl,

My question is why don't you verify what was said before commenting on it?  See Rush Limbaugh's transcript below and you will see that he was not serious, it was satire/tongue in cheek humor.  He is making fun of people who believe this stuff.


The Great Darkness Crisis of '08

December 19, 2008


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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Now, there is a letter to the editor at the AmericanThinker.com today. I just touched on it. Dear editor: "I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but I have detected a new crisis that I have named 'the daylight change crisis.' I first noticed it sometime around the end of June this year. I started paying attention and created computer models and sure enough I was right! We are losing daylight at an astonishing rate. Each day we are losing approximately 2 minutes of daylight and my computer models predict total darkness by next July. I have been able to detect this phenomenon around the entire Northern Hemisphere. And here is the scary part: the daylight appears to be leaking to the Southern Hemisphere. I thought I should bring it to the attention of great scientists like Al Gore so he can help solve this new crisis." This is actually brilliant. And this is brilliant because this is a great illustration of how the entire global warming scare is happening. In the summertime, they will tell you the ice at the Antarctic and the Arctic Circles is disappearing. They never tell us about the disappearing ice this time of year, they never tell us about the increasing ice. I thought it was pretty good.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT


RUSH: Gainesville, Florida. Caroline, nice to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hi.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: Yes. I'm calling in. You were talking about the two minutes a day that we're losing in sunlight.

RUSH: The crisis, yes.

CALLER: Okay, well, I've been studying this for a couple of years now. It shows it in the Mayan calendar, they have five calendars. They have the calendar that is the 24-hour a day --

RUSH: We don't use the Mayan calendar and they're extinct.

CALLER: Listen to this. This is the explanation, now. You want to hear it? We are in a wobble, and we're coming out of it because all the planets are going around at different states, places in the solar system, and they are soon going to be lining up, and when they do, this is creating gravitational pole shifting. It's straightening the earth up, so it's going to be spinning like a top. Just spun. It's not going to have a wobble anymore. And whenever it's spinning like that, it's spinning faster. And of course we're going around and we're spinning faster and we're losing these minutes. So we're going into this new Mayan calendar, they wrote it, they experienced it and we're going to be straightening up, we're not going to be wobbling.

RUSH: My friends, let me confirm what Caroline here in Gainesville, Florida, is saying. If the wobble is ending, then we in the northern hemisphere, by next June or July, will be out of light. It will be permanently dark. Computer models indicate this. We're losing two minutes of light a day. There's no end in sight to this. And if it keeps up, computer models say we're in total darkness, and she's right, all the light is going down in the southern hemisphere. And I guess even the Mayan calendars, all five of them, predicted this.


END TRANSCRIPT

Read the Background Material...

• American Thinker: Something Else for Al Gore to Worry About  

Answer
Hello,

Oooookay...I guess it's "gotcha" time again on this channel. First, let me say I pay no attention to Rush Limbaugh, though I have received 2nd hand info of his whacko views on global warming. Among the latest was a comment-question he raised about a week ago, to the effect, "How come humans can't emit CO2 when plants do it all the time? How come plants can pollute and we can't?"

This is the type of tripe that makes one wonder what planet he is living on, and also makes it more plausible to suspect he would peddle any other form of tripe. What's the old saw? "Give a dog a bad name and hang him?"

Thus, when a previous questioner seriously asked about this, yes, I made the assumption it was codswallop on the level I'd already been informed about. It is not up to ME - technically- to parse Rush's tripe, but for the questioner to have done so (or at least listened completely to the program!) and for ***THEM*** to have seen he wasn't taking it seriously.

My assumption then, as hard as it may be to see or accept, is that I assume questioners have at least a modicum of intellect first *before they ask a question*. At least enough to have heard or determined that the show or whatever in which El Rushbo made reference to "lost daylight" was done in jest, and not to be taken seriously.

But I am not about to waste my time, looking for old Rush transcripts to make that determination! Let's get that straight off the bat. Perusing old Rush Limbaugh transcripts is not part of my all-expert mandate, or at least I don't regard it as such.

I guess what I will have to do is henceforth is to practice even more severe censorship and elimination of dubious, nonsensical questions - placing a firm REJECT upon them, especially any that bear the monicker of "Rush Limbaugh"!