California Governor Jerry Brown (D) reacted angrily on yesterday’s Meet the Press after watching a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz (R) saying that debates on climate change-related events should follow the science and the data. Cruz made those comments on Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Brown had come on NBC’s Meet the Press to discuss Cruz’s earlier announcement that he was running for president. Brown was then shown footage of the senator talking about the environment on Late Night and delved into a rant that Cruz was a “bald-faced ignorant liar” and ‘absolutely unfit’ to run for office.
Brown was particularly adamant there was a “connection to the current drought [in California]” and climate change. “That man [Cruz] betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of the existing scientific data. It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.… Look, they say the scientists know more about it. I will tell you this, our research results…say there’s a connection to the current drought and extreme weather in the East, other parts of the world.”
However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported in December 2014 that “Natural weather patterns, not man-made global warming, are causing the historic drought parching California.” If we follow the science, as Brown insists, then the California drought has nothing to do with climate change.
“It’s important to note that California’s drought, while extreme, is not an uncommon occurrence for the state,” said Richard Seager, the report’s lead author and professor with Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory. The report was sponsored by NOAA and reviewed by other NOAA scientists before being issued. “In fact,” Seager told USA Today, “multiyear droughts appear regularly in the state’s climate record, and it’s a safe bet that a similar event will happen again.”
Brown, who is known for his indecorous outbursts and global warming alarmism, said Cruz was a “bald-faced ignorant liar on climate change and absolutely unfit to be running for office.” Brown, whose state is in the midst of a multi-year water shortage, has declared California is in a state of emergency due to the drought. By making that declaration, the floodgates of taxpayer money can now flow into the state without a lot of legislative loops.
But it was Cruz’s comments on Late Night with Seth Meyers that provoked Brown’s ire: “My view actually is simple. Debates on this should follow science and should follow data. And many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up.” Cruz is referring to the the 18-plus hiatus in global warming, no category 3 or higher hurricane making U.S. landfall in over a decade, the fewest tornadoes so far this year since 1969, record-breaking cold temperatures east of the Mississippi, an extremely quiet mutli-year cyclone season (Pam included), no increase in yearly sea level rise, and more.
Brown said the drought in California was linked to carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, and that Washington needed to take drastic action to avoid the consequences of a changing climate, NBC News reported. “[Brown] recently announced a $1 billion aid package to help affected residents and prepare for flooding.” Brown was also busy behind the scenes getting a new global warming tax bill passed, which hit motorists with new fees this year.
According to James Kamis, a professional geologist who believes that geologic forces play a much larger role than atmospheric conditions, said NOAA’s report shows that “an unusually persistent (three year) winter time atmospheric high pressure ridge has diverted and blocked rain-bearing storms from reaching California, and that unusually elevated ocean surface temperatures in the far western Gulf of Alaska was aiding in this process. This is a very significant conclusion, because the study implies that atmospheric conditions are being driven by warm ocean water, not the other way around.”
And last September, the San Jose Mercury News reported that out of three new studies, two show that climate change isn’t linked to the California drought and the third showed no link to the drought, just warmer water. “The evidence isn’t there, conclude the editors of one report — an anthology of more than 20 climate studies published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.”
“These effects counteract each other, contributing to no appreciable long-term change in risk of dry climate extremes over California,” according to a paper by Hailan Wang and Siegfried Schubert of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The third report, from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, also concluded that “ocean warming, while real, is not contributing to our drought, because the blob of warming water is too far west of the critical region,” and it “does not explicitly blame California’s drought on climate change.”
Prior to the recent drought, “California’s driest periods were in 1863-1864 when the state was scorched by the Great Drought. The California Department of Water Resources lists other large-scale multi-year droughts in 1918-1920, 1923-1926, 1928-1935 and 1947-1950.”
The Golden State has dried up before and will dry up again. It’s the very nature of a changing climate. Whether man is influencing it in some appreciable way is very much up to debate. As for the drought, the science is telling us we are not the problem and it can be chalked up to natural, recurring climatic changes.
