I think I have figured out why Democrats are so wedded to the climate change narrative, even when it doesn’t make sense or isn’t supported by the evidence. The reason is that they have figured out that, to their own scientifically illiterate voters, climate change works as a universally applicable scapegoat. Why bother informing yourself about literally any issue under the sun when you can just blame anything that is going wrong on climate change and know that at least liberal voters will believe it.

The latest example of this is California Governor Jerry Brown, who is blaming the recent spate of wildfires on climate change. Wildfires in California have been an issue since as at least as long as I’ve been alive, so it seems that the connection is tenuous at best. And, indeed, even people who are committed believers in climate change were forced to note that, even under the assumption that climate change is real and man made, Brown’s comments were completely full of crap:

The ash of the Rocky fire was still hot when Gov. Jerry Brown strode to a bank of television cameras beside a blackened ridge and, flanked by firefighters, delivered a battle cry against climate change.

The wilderness fire was “a real wake-up call” to reduce the carbon pollution “that is in many respects driving all of this,” he said.

“The fires are changing…. The way this fire performed, it’s not the way it usually has been. Going in lots of directions, moving fast, even without hot winds.”

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But scientists who study climate change and fire behavior say their work does not show a link between this year’s wildfires and global warming, or support Brown’s assertion that fires are now unpredictable and unprecedented. There is not enough evidence, they say.

University of Colorado climate change specialist Roger Pielke said Brown is engaging in “noble-cause corruption.”

Pielke said it is easier to make a political case for change using immediate and local threats, rather than those on a global scale, especially given the subtleties of climate change research, which features probabilities subject to wide margins of error and contradiction by other findings.

“That is the nature of politics,” Pielke said, “but sometimes the science really has to matter.”

Of course, this wasn’t even the most insane invocation of climate change by a Democrat in the last year. In the first Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders was asked about the greatest national security threat facing this country. Bernie Sanders knows even less about foreign policy than he does about economics, so he loudly trumpeted that climate change was the greatest national security threat facing the country. Democrat primary voters, Sanders’ target audience, don’t really care about things like confronting ISIS or maintaining America’s standing in the world, so they loved the answer.

But the great thing about being a Democrat is that if someone presses you about ISIS and wants an actual answer on how you are going to deal with them, you can just blame them on climate change, too:

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley said on Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect that ISIS came about because of the effects of climate change.

“One of the things that preceded the failure of the nation-state of Syria and the rise of ISIS, was the effects of climate change and the mega-drought that effected that region,” he said, noting how it  “wiped out farmers, drove people to cities, [and] created a humanitarian crisis.”

“It created the symptoms, or rather the conditions of extreme poverty that has led now to the rise of ISIL and this extreme violence,” O’Malley concluded.

Not to be outdone, liberals have also suggested that climate change caused the Syrian civil war in the first place.

Did you think that the Obama administration didn’t handle the Ebola outbreak particularly well? That’s okay, it was caused by climate change as well. Troubled about the recent crime wave? Don’t worry – also caused by climate change, according to liberals.

Liberals are not, by and large, very good about policy, but one thing they are very good at is concocting scenarios where literally every problem in the world can be laid at the feet of climate change. Sometimes the explanations are creative and actually quite impressive, but in a pinch they don’t even bother with explaining how the two are linked because they know that their voters won’t bother to look too closely at whether their claim is backed up by the “science” of climate change anyway.

There’s a reason that liberals cling to the climate change narrative like their lives depend on it: they know that if they don’t, they will have to actually come up with answers to questions that they don’t have the first clue about.