Politico:
Rush Limbaugh on Monday accused the media and liberals of creating the polar vortex to “lie” to the public about the “hoax” of climate change and global warming.
The conservative radio host told his listeners that “the left, the media, everybody” came up with “this phrase called the ‘polar vortex’” to connect the current cold weather conditions around the country to “the global warming agenda.”
In his words: "Do you know what the polar vortex is? Have you ever heard of it? Well, they just created it for this week." And why did they create it?
“We are having a record-breaking cold snap in many parts of the country,” he said, according to a transcript. “And right on schedule the media have to come up with a way to make it sound like it’s completely unprecedented. Because they’ve got to find a way to attach this to the global warming agenda, and they have. It’s called the ‘polar vortex.’ The dreaded polar vortex.”
Oh, the irony of Rush Limbaugh accusing the media of spreading a hoax when (a) everything he said is pure gibberish and (b) media outlets like Politico reported his claim without pointing out that fact.
I mean, it's sort of interesting that Rush Limbaugh said something crazy, but would really have been interesting is if Politico had spent maybe one or two sentences (or heck, even a full paragraph) pointing out that what he said was absolutely insane and completely disconnected from reality. But they didn't.
Nonetheless, despite Politico's failure to say so, there's nothing new about the polar vortex. Here's a Wikipedia page from nearly a decade ago. Nexis has the term going back to 1974, in The New York Times. So it's not some phrase created in order to promote a climate change "hoax."
In a way, the craziest thing that Limbaugh said was that climate scientists would even feel the need to do something as crazy as spinning a snap of cold weather. What happens in any given week doesn't prove anything about the climate one way or another. What matters is the long-term trend. And there's nothing fake about that either.