Why Does the American South Embrace Climate Change Denialism?

Even as climate change whipsaws the American south, states such as Florida and Texas remain hotbeds of global warming denialism.

The outgoing governor of Texas, who is expected to seek the GOP nomination in 2016, Rick Perry maintains that climate change is "a theory that has not been proven."  Of course this is the same jackass who claimed that, with enough prayer, Jeebus would deliver the Lone Star State from its ongoing megadrought.   Now there's a theory that has not been proven.

From the Environmental Defense Fund:

NOAA’s comprehensive [State of the Climate report] stands as a rebuke to what we hear from many Texas lawmakers. Four major independent datasets agree that, globally, 2012 was among the ten warmest years on record (ranking either 8 or 9 depending on the dataset used). It was also the warmest year in American history. All that heat plunged the country into a billion-dollar drought, with 61.8% of the contiguous U.S. in drought conditions by July. While Texas fared better than the central U.S. in 2012, the all-time record-breaking summer of 2011 is still fresh in the memory of most Texans. The extreme temperatures and associated drought contributed to the most destructive wildfires in Texas history. The La Niña-related heat wave that prompted 2011’s extremes was made 20 times more likely by climate change.

...But even as mainstream American society searches for the best ways to cope with a changing climate, our leaders in Texas still have their heads in the sand. In fact, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has removed mention of climate change from state-commissioned reports, calling it “unsettled science, in our opinion.”

And Florida, next only to Louisiana in vulnerability to sea level rise and severe tropical storm impacts, climate change denialism is alive and well.  GOP pretty boy, Mark Rubio, continues to insist that the whole notion of anthropogenic climate change remains mired in "reasonable debate."