Media Matters has a particularly choice bit of audio up on their site, in which Rush Limbaugh pontificates on why people believe in global warming. There are at least eight things wrong about his argument, but you know what? It doesn't really matter.

You may know people like this. When you ask them something, they give you an excuse. And the excuse is pretty stupid. So you dig a little deeper, and they throw up another excuse. It's like layers of an onion, but it's stupid excuses all the way down until you get to the middle. And the middle is usually something like "Because I don't want to," that you can't argue with.

Eventually you learn that it's futile to try and argue with these outer layers of excuses. For one thing, they aren't real. For another thing, they're just whatever that person came up with on the spur of the moment, and these aren't the works of a mastermind of deceit.

That's what it's like with Rush Limbaugh and climate change. (Which he naturally insists on calling by the misleading term "global warming.") You can keep peeling that onion, making salient and scientifically verifiable arguments all the way down. But eventually you get to the heart of the matter. And the heart of the matter is, Rush Limbaugh will never believe in climate change, no matter what, full stop.

There are two reasons why Rush Limbaugh will never publicly admit to a belief in climate change:

1. Because the wrong sort of people believe in climate change. Hippies. Leftists. Rush would never risk tarnishing his reputation by publicly espousing a belief that leftists believe, too. No matter how ridiculous his denials become.

2. Because he is on record as not believing in climate change, and Rush Limbaugh can never be publicly seen to change his mind.

Changing his mind would mean that he was wrong before, you see. And worse, changing his mind on this matter would mean that he was influenced by scientists and hippies! Admitting it would basically mean the death of his show. He would lose all credibility with his audience, who are (by all accounts) a bunch of scientifically illiterate yet tenacious right wing yokels. The man would be tarred and feathered at high noon in the town square!

So, yes, Rush's argument that people believe in something because of a temperature differential caused by air conditioning is ridiculous. But he cannot be seen to be convinced by scientific data, so these are the kinds of ridiculous arguments that the man has to fall back on. Welcome to Dogma City, population: 1!