After years of denying the Earth’s temperature has been steadily rising, researchers at the world’s foremost authority on noxious greenhouse gases, the Fox News/EIB Network Climatology Institute, now conclude global warming does in fact pose a threat to civilization. Furthermore, institute scientists have detected a connection between this troubling trend and two seemingly unrelated phenomena: passage of the U.S. Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare; along with efforts by gun-control activists to undermine the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

    “A hallmark of responsible scientific research is admitting your mistakes,” Dr. Francis N. Furter, the institute’s director, said in a prepared statement that sought to distance itself from his organization’s previously held view that global warming ‘is nothing more than an irrational belief, much like evolution.”

    “There now exists a preponderance of evidence that year to year and degree by degree, the planet’s mean temperature has been rising,” Dr. Furter said, citing numerous studies by independent scientific organizations.

    While other research institutions studying the impact of climate change have focused on such concerns as rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps, more prolonged droughts, as well as the increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes, blizzards, tornadoes and other violent meteorological events, the Fox News/EIB Network Climatology Institute has examined cultural rather than scientific correlations.

    “As surprised as we were by higher temperatures, we were even more astonished to learn that this rise coincided with the federal health care initiative, as well as attempts to strip law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms,” Dr. Furter said. He stopped short of blaming Obamacare and gun control for global warming, but suggested the reverse may be true.

    “It has long been established that high temperature impairs function in the cerebral cortex,” Dr. Furter said. “We know that patients with a fever often become delusional. Therefore it is not too much of a stretch to postulate, using the vernacular, that climate change makes you dumb.”

    He added, “Dumb people make dumb laws.”

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    I know the above frivolous, fanciful commentary sets me up as a punching bag for all the crazed climate-change deniers who like to point to the past few days of frigid, blustery and snowy weather as “evidence” that global warming is a hoax – but I say the furious storm, and others like it, prove what climatologists have been warning all along: We can expect more extreme weather more often.

    This may be the start of a long, cold winter, so get used to it.