A Drought of Sanity in California
Daniel Greenfield January 12, 2017
The ink was hardly dry on the Secretarial Order from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell blaming California's drought on global warming that rain and snow swept across the state. San Francisco International Airport was forced to cancel flights and there were blizzard warnings for Lake Tahoe.
The Los Angeles Times warned breathlessly of a winter war footing. San Francisco, the home of a million companies cashing in on environmental panics, received 130% of average rainfall. Sacramento, where terrible ideas from San Francisco go to become law under a Democratic supermajority, is at 160%.
Governor Jerry Brown had signed an executive order last year making temporary drought restrictions all but permanent. "Drought is becoming a regular occurrence," Executive Order B-37-16 stated. Then the proposal to "Make Conservation a California Way of Life" had made a big splash among bureaucrats.
"California is currently in the grips of an extreme drought with record low precipitation," it gloomily began. Then the Sacramento River flooded, the downtown rainfall record was broken and copies of the report came in handy as makeshift umbrellas by scurrying staffers. So there was nothing left to do but blame Global Warming.
If the rain doesn't fall, that's Global Warming. If it does fall, that too is Global Warming. The moonbeam left has traded in God for Global Warming as its universal answer to everything.
After years of predicting that California's future would be a barren desert, the predictions have been slightly revised. California is now doomed to alternate between droughts and storms. And if it rains cats and dogs over Death Valley, we will be told that Global Warming causes canine and feline precipitation and that unless we agree to give Al Gore more money, we're doomed to be brained by falling felines. Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown believes in Global Warming the way that the followers of his old pal, Jim Jones, believed in drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. He's even prepared to put his satellites where his brain is.
"We've got the scientists, we've got the lawyers and we're ready to fight," Brown ranted to the American Geophysical Union. "If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite."
Anyone who doubts that Governor Moonbeam can launch his own satellite ought to take a close look at how well high-speed rail is coming along. After being backed by Obama's stimulus plan in '09, the first and easiest leg of it has lately been delayed by four years. The stimulus money has to be spent by next year and there's no way to pay for any of the rest of it except with more global warming taxes.
At this rate, the magic anti-Trump satellite would cost $100 billion and be ready to go by 2054.
But that's pocket change considering how much money California has already spent and lost on Governor Moonbeam's obsession with the Great Green Apocalypse.
Brown demanded that Obama institute a permanent ban on offshore drilling. Offshore drilling might even produce enough money to fund his high-speed rail obsession. But math and Moonbeam have never been on speaking terms. He doesn't have policies. He has dreams.
"My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It's been a place of dreams. We can pursue a path of benign energy," he once said.
The drought has allowed Brown to pursue his dreams. Global Warming is a crisis in search of a disaster. Warmunists struggle to tether it to any natural or unnatural disaster from random hurricanes to the civil war in Syria.
An op-ed at the Los Angeles Times asked readers to see, "the devastation of climate change in the ruins of Aleppo." It makes the fashionable claim that the war wasn't caused by Sunni-Shiite hostilities but by, what else, drought. Syria has apparently been suffering from the "worst drought in nine centuries."
Who knew that detailed rainfall records had been kept in Syria for nearly a thousand years?
The civil war in Syria might be explained by the 900 year drought, but what about the wars in Yemen, Libya, the Sinai, Mali and countless other places as part of the Arab Spring? Was there a drought in the eighties during the last Sunni-Shiite civil war in Syria between Assad Sr. and the Muslim Brotherhood?
Or during any of the countless wars that have been taking place in the area for thousands of years?
California's current drought is said to be the worst in 1,200 years. Others insist it's merely the worst in 500 years.
Who knew that hunter-gatherers without a written language could keep such careful records?
But it's all about how you define "drought". The Great Drought of the 1860s was a good deal worse in lack of rain and in the devastating impact on California. There were drier years far more recently than 1,200 years ago. And there wasn't a whole lot of industry in California in the 1860s to blame it on.
To call this the worst drought in 150 years, never mind 1,200 or 12 billion years, you have to customize the definition of "drought" to make it so. Like so much of Warmunism, you draw the target around the arrow. And once you have your crisis, then you can use alarmism to make a massive power grab.
"I think this almost has to be at the level of a crusade," Governor Brown declared.
Now Brown's crusade is all wet. But Warmunist alarmism recovers quickly every time the world
doesn't end at the stroke of midnight. In the seventies, environmentalists were promoting Paul Ehrlich's claims that 65 million Americans would starve to death a decade later. At the British Institute for Biology, he predicted that, "England will not exist in the year 2000". Today Ehrlich, the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, is predicting that we'll soon have to turn to cannibalism.
If you doubt any of this, you must hate science.
Later the panic switched to predicting an ice age. The various doomsday scenarios under the umbrella of "climate change" have kept rotating in and out like bad actors on a cheap stage.
A 2003 DOD report envisioned flooding could producing an inland sea in California. Recently the National Research Council report, sponsored in part by California, warned that San Francisco International Airport could be flooded in a few decades. The worst drought in 12 billion years made for some better headlines because the drought, unlike most of the other scenarios, actually existed. But before long the Green Apocalypse crowd will be predicting a California buried under mountains of ice.
Natural disasters are the drama that lubricates a corrupt government industry which deprives ordinary people of water, food, heating and life out of a combination of ideological hostility to technology and the flow of money to special interests in the business of saving the planet from a manufactured crisis.
The California state budget approaches $180 billion. That's a 5% increase in only one year. But being an "international leader" in fighting "climate change" doesn't come cheap. The new budget grabs even more cap-and-trade power to be spent on Big Green Business and reinforces the illegal tax for auctioning off "pollution" allowances. And then there's e money for the high-speed rail to nowhere.
None of this will stop droughts or storms. But it will move money to the right people. The ones, like Al Gore, living in luxury condos in San Francisco about to be flooded by the Great Green Apocalypse that never comes. And it's always been about the money. Everything else is theater. Rain or sun, flood or drought, the scripts get rewritten, the bills get passed and the Global Warming show goes on.
(This article originally appeared at Front Page Magazine)
Posted by: Daniel Greenfield at January 12, 2017
Friends of Amherst Trees 13/1/17
Mr. Greenfield-
Just stumbled across your blogs. The one on Israel really knocked my socks off. You know how to write, and you grasp the issues. Keep it up. You have a new fan.
Hope (Tikvah Chava)
Amherst MA
Brian Richard Allen 13/1/17
.... The fascist Left has traded in God for "Global Warming" ....
Would beg to suggest the Left has never known God and, thus, that He was never the Left's, to trade. And that all the Left traded was its banners. It ditched those that called it fascist and/or communist, for new ones that call its calling, "Climate Change."
Same time as the Left's military-industrial complex's pseudo scientists made the switch and became, instead, the Mann-Made-Global-Warming Industrial Complex's pseudo scientists.
"Employer" -- and paychecks -- unchanged.
Daniel Greenfield 13/1/17
Hope, thank you, I'm glad to hear that, Hope
Anonymous 13/1/17
"England will not exist in the year 2000"
Well they got that one right but not for the reason they stated. The England that I grew up with does not exist anymore thanks to unlimited immigration and the inability to deport troublemakers.
Empress Trudy 13/1/17
The liberal, the leftist, the communist mind sees the world in terms of shortages and rationing. Everything we need, everything we want, is as good as, or as much as it will ever be right now and things can only get worse. Whatever it is, if it's not running out it's poisonous.
The core reasons for this are:
Establish scarcity to divide people and set them against each other
Create a panic that only government is big enough to manage and then grow the government to manage it
Strangle hope, murder progress, beat invention to death
Destroy all viable solutions to that scarcity so that scarcity never goes away
Eventually Scarcity becomes dogma and all resistance to that dogma is heresy. To them the role of government is to carefully and with micromanagement dole out those tiny parcels of whatever is running down until there's nothing. When society implodes and we're all cannibals, sweep in and start over.
I've been asking global warmers for years where the mile thick glacier went where my house stands. No industry 15,000 years ago and not that many people building fires. No answer, ever. They just go, uh, well," or ignore the question. They are nuts in California. I lived in Frisco maybe a year when I was young. I hated it. The famed Haight Ashbury was a slum of garbage and drugs. Golden Gate Park featured every weirdo and pervert on the planet. Probably still does. And they scam the people with global warming.
Infidel 13/1/17
SF was wonderful in the 1950s, especially Golden Gate Park. My grandfather was chief civil engineer there from the late 1930s thru early 1950s, and left SF in wonderful shape. He built something like 19 bridges in the city, if you see one with colored concrete that is probably one of his, he pioneered the use of colored concrete. But after he retired, all kinds of troubles started in the 1960s, due to corrupt Democratic politicians.
Liberals are 'epic minded', human history's purpose has seemingly been them all along. The rest are accessories, simple tools in the best case scenario or utter deplorables in the worst, never humans like them.
D.D.Mao 14/1/17
Climate change and the environment is a religion on the "LEFT" coast.California has always been known for fruits and nuts!
My impression is that the left hasn't so much traded in God. Rather, its collective ego is so far gone as to demand a promotion and be recognized as THE supreme deity. After all, what else would one call that which commands the global climate? I call such a mindset delusional. Dangerously so.
Mogumbo Gono 16/1/17
This chart was made from NASA's own data:
https://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/image69.png
Here's another one, showing the same thing:
http://i1.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2015/10/Global-2-copy.jpg
The planet is still recovering from the Little Ice Age—one of the coldest episodes of the 10,000 year long Holocene climate that we're still in.
We see that there has been no acceleration in the very *mild* natural warming indicated in the charts above.
The "carbon" scare is still around for only one reason: the government's insistence that it should be able to tax the air we breathe.
For good reason, human societies place value on a calls to alarm for fire, attack, etc. But we warn against Chicken Little, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. By misusing alarm, the fraud loses all further credibility.
ABSJ1136
Anonymous said: .... I call such a mindset delusional. Dangerously so ....
True. But isn't Fascissocialism in its every form and by any of its names - including "islam" - a psychosis? Its high priests, promulgators and practitioners, psychopaths? Its supporters, subjects and supplicants: whether Muhummud's, Soros's or Jim Jones's; sociopaths and/or savants and/or deadly-dangerous dullards?
Just read a long article in 538 analyzing what is wrong with the Dems. Yet nowhere was there mention of pursuing policies good for the country, just on better selling the Progressive message.
Seen that in California. Haven't yet seen one Progressive program that was good for the state, all are destructive. They completely ignore any constructive ideas, just push forward blindly towards Progressive Utopia with policies that have the opposite effect of what they claim.
electromotive 31/1/17
California democrats are responsible for the drought. Have blocked all dam construction thus allowing over 65% of rain water to flow into ocean. Instead spend tax money on benefits for illegals and the multi billion dollar train to nowhere
Unknown 8/2/17
While visiting a friend in Santa Ana, CA back in 1977 I made mention of the river trail behind his apartment complex. "Yeah" said my friend, "come winter it'll be full and the water will run into the Pacific." When I asked about the drought conditions written about in the Orange County Register and why didn't they save the water, I was met with a blank stare.
Seems blank stares are still in season out there.
Brian Richard Allen 9/2/17
By the willful treasonous activities and actions of the fascist Left, California has been overrun by many millions of the invading and hostilely-colonizing criminal aliens the Left Calls "undocumented "Democrats," (several million of whom vote in our nation's elections) has degenerated into a third-world status -- and gets worse by the week. Tyranny is just around the bend.
Anonymous 6/8/17
In fact, the great California megaflood of 1862 (in the middle of the supposed "drought of the 1860s") *did* turn large parts of California into an "inland sea." This is a matter of historical record.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862
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