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Dude, it rained in California

30 Aug 2023 | News Roundup

Climate activists, including those in the media, are so totally convinced that the weather is getting worse that they no longer bother to check. And so when Hurricane Hilary approached California everyone was thrilled (except possibly the Democrats’ 2016 Presidential nominee). Oh boy. Here comes the apocalyptic climate-breakdown-proving action for sure. NBC hyperventilated that “Hurricane Hilary could bring record rainfall to parts of the Southwest” followed by “Forecasters warn of ‘catastrophic’ flooding as Hurricane Hilary churns toward California.” That gave way to, er, “Storm speeds up as Southern California residents prepare for ‘catastrophic’ flooding” at which time it slowed down: “The storm weakened to a Category 1 with maximum sustained winds around 90 mph Saturday night, the National Weather Service said.” And from there the alarmism kept washing away.

NBC soon emailed “Millions under tropical storm warning as California braces for heavy rain” which morphed into “California officials warn ‘worst of the storm has yet to come’ as Hilary makes landfall/ Forecasters warn of ‘life-threatening flooding’ as the storm begins to bring rain to the southwestern U.S.” Followed by “Earthquake rattles Southern California as Hilary makes landfall/ Hilary, now a tropical storm, slammed Southern California with drenching rain and the chance of life-threatening flooding.”

Next was “Historic rainfall slams L.A.” But it’s not historic. Nor was it a hurricane; in something of an anticlimax “Tropical storm Hilary has now entered the history books as the first to hit Southern California in 84 years.” Which would lead some to wonder, with all this talk of hurricanes a-blowin’ and rivers overflowin’, why it’s the first since 1939 and what caused that one. The Model T? And why it wasn’t a hurricane when it hit. Isn’t climate breakdown making them frighteningly routine?

Also, the National Weather Service “official weather station for L.A. at the University of Southern California measured 1.53 inches of rain, breaking a record that was set in 1906.” So there was rain then too. But what about pre-1906? If it rained harder, and historical accounts certainly suggest that it did, what’s this about a “record”? Well, how about the record flooding of ’22? As in 1822. Or the one in 1850 that turned the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea and Sacramento into a “second Venice”? Forget to Google?

As for all that death, Heatmap Daily conceded on August 21 that “it sounds like Los Angeles may have made it through the brunt of the storm with only minor damage”. What a ripoff. As for the predicted heaps of corpses deposited by the raging climate breakdown waters, um yes well the New York Times allowed that “California Evades Catastrophic Damage From Rare Tropical Storm” and “After bracing for the worst, the state so far has recorded no deaths from Tropical Storm Hilary, officials said.”

Hurricane Hilary visited California and all we got was this lousy “Some desert and mountain communities are digging out from a deluge of mud.” The story even quoted former Los Angeles county supervisor and city councilman Zev Yaroslavsky that “I can’t remember a major storm in which we had no fatalities.”

Still, by August 22 NBC was back at it with an email that “Tropical Storm Harold makes landfall in Texas with threat of flash flooding and tornadoes”. And when it didn’t pan out, they headlined the piece “After hitting Texas as a tropical storm, Harold weakens to tropical depression” with “maximum sustained winds of 50 mph. But the next day they emailed “Heat and tropical storms batter the Midwest and the South” and headlined it “Dangerous heat for over 93 million in Midwest and South”. If at first you don’t succeed… there’s gotta be a pile of bodies somewhere, right? I mean global boiling, climate breakdown, uninhabitable planet and all that.

As usual when it comes to climate change, everything is bad and so is its opposite. Drought in California? Appalling… and our fault. Rain in California? Appalling… and our fault.

6 comments on “Dude, it rained in California”

  1. My godfather, who was a reporter for many years, as well having been a high level public affairs official in Washington, DC for many years, called this kind of reporting, "the 'Holy S**t!' school of journalism."

  2. Having grown up in SoCal, I remember all of the storm ditches that were there but rarely had more than a trickle in them (same storm ditches you see in Terminator 2). Presumably, the city planners of yesteryear had good reason to have them built, like past experience with heavy rains. With all of the palm trees and green grass everywhere, people don’t understand that most of SoCal, from LA to San Diego, is all coastal desert. That means hard, baked dirt that is semi-hydrophobic when the occasional deluge does show up.

  3. Being in Canada under Facebook's news blockade for Canadians, I couldn't post the illustration of Sacramento in the Great Flood of 1862 when Governor Stanford rowed to the new State Capitol building and climbed in the second floor windows. Why Meta thinks an 1862 story is "news" is interesting by itself, but since nobody remembers anything anyway, probably does not matter.

  4. The problem with "Holy sh*t" journalism is that folks may eventually get bored or worse, notice the shifting goal posts and become suspicious. Much more efficient in the long term is the simple drip feed approach of having weather forecasters persistently substitute the undefined word "normal" for the verifiable "average" in every description.
    This produces the desired permanent sense of unease from expert information confirming the weather is always, "abnormal".

  5. Since 1890 this kind of journalism was called Yellow Journalism. Anything to sensationalize the news to attract readers/viewers. It is also editorialization of the news -- their personal opinion. It is not reporting what happens only what might happen.

  6. I think you need to focus on Arrhenius and the Green House effect.
    He did an experiment that showed that CO2 in the atmosphere was absorbing infrared
    radiation and radiating it back to Earth. He claimed that it was sufficient to increase the
    Earth's surface temperature 5 degrees centigrade.
    This is non-sense unless the back radiation exceeds the radiation emitted. Where does the warmth coming from?
    Nobody seems to know.
    The 33 degrees K that is reported as Green House Effect is the different between the actual average temperature and the temperature
    fora black body object i.e. 0 degrees Kelvin and no atmosphere. Since the Earth is not and has NEVER been a black body, this effect is irrelevant. That is to say that it has absolutely nothing to do with global warming either now or in the past.

    Alan Montgomery

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