Lamar Smith, head of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee, who doesn't believe in science.

James Delingpole is a Briton who admits he’s just a reader of English literature, not a scientist. That didn’t stop him from publishing another of his duncecap climate change denier pieces at Breitbart, where he has posted for the past couple of years. Meanwhile, somebody—perhaps Chairman Lamar Smith himself—at the House Science, Space & Technology Committee tweeted (or authorized) a link to Delingpole’s piece, tossing it out like Sen. James Inhofe’s snowball on the Senate floor for everyone to see:

x .@BreitbartNews: Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists https://t.co/uLUPW4o93V Ã¢ÂÂ Sci,Space,&Tech Cmte (@HouseScience) December 1, 2016

According to this screed by Delingpole, who once wrote that executions were too good for climate scientists, 2016 is the hottest year on record solely because of the periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean—El Niño—and global temperatures will retreat because of La Niña, the countervailing cyclic cooling. This, of course, totally ignores the long-term trend. It’s not just 2016 that was the hottest year ever measured. Ten of the hottest years ever have all occurred since 1998.

Given that the most popular climate story on social media in the past six months labeled the science behind global warming a hoax, presumably tens of thousands of readers will nod uh-huh when they read that tweet, an official message from a committee supposedly dedicated to science. Chairman Smith, a Texas Republican, is simultaneously a head-in-the-sand, 100-percent climate change denier and a head-up-his-ass attacker of science and scientists.