Oklahoma senator James Inhofe did the world no favors earlier this year when he brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in order to “disprove” global warming. For one, a blizzard hitting Washington, D.C. tells us absolutely nothing about whether man-made climate change is indeed occurring. His stunt also was a gift to the left, who have, predictably, referred to the incident over and over again as if it were the ne plus ultra of right-leaning thinking on climate. Inhofe, after all, serves the narrative – that conservatives are anti-intellectual cretins, of course – in a way that, say, Irwin Stelzer does not.

Take New York Times columnist Timothy Egan. In his most recent column, which uses unusually hot weather in Seattle as a peg to discuss climate change, Egan predictably goes back to the Inhofe well.