According to Scientific American, valley fever will eat California because of climate change. It’s not high taxes, crime or unreliable energy due to wacky climate policy causing people to flee the Golden State. Instead, “The flooding caused by intensifying winter rainstorms in California is helping to spread a deadly fungal disease called coccidioidomycosis, or Valley fever.” Which loves wet and dry weather and now California has both, unlike the past when it alternated flooding and droughts. Hey, wait a minute.

The piece explains that doom looms as usual:

“‘Hydro-climate whiplash is increasingly wide swings between extremely wet and extremely dry conditions,’ said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles. Humans are finding it difficult to adapt to this new pattern. But fungi are thriving, Swain said. Valley fever, he added, ‘is going to become an increasingly big story.’”

Oh man. Hydro-climate whiplash. Brutal. And humans are finding it difficult to adapt, with the population of California plunging to just 38.9 million, slightly less than all of Canada. Humans cannot, indeed, adapt.

As for Valley Fever, this newcomer is “named for California’s San Joaquin Valley, where the disease was discovered in a farmworker in the late 1800s”. But nowadays thousands of cases turn up a year among just 39 million people.

The piece also asserts that:

“until last year’s series of drought-busting atmospheric rivers, California was in the throes of a long-term drought pattern; 2000 to 2021 was the driest two-decade stretch in the Southwest in 12 centuries. Climate models predict the Golden State will endure more droughts in the future.”

They do not know the first bit. Here, for comparison, is a 2,000 year precipitation proxy for locations along the California and Oregon coasts with each dot representing a moving 30-year average and the year 1900 marked by a vertical line:

The final 800 years shows a steady decline which obviously had its origins in natural causes. And whatever value is observed in the 20^th century, it is within the range of values shown in the past when there were no GHG’s to blame. But no amount of evidence of historical variability will stop alarmists from ranting and raving things like:

“as far as we know, and in the natural course of events, our world has never – in its entire history – heated up as rapidly as it is doing now.”

Actually that one is just plain false. It certainly warmed faster than in the 20^th century at the end of the “Younger Dryas” cold spell, possibly 5C or more in a century. But the Younger Dryas was within the Holocene so we have much better proxies than those that have been run over by glaciations, or weathered over 100 million years. What might have been going on in the Cretaceous on the scale of a century is completely obscure.

Even within the Holocene, it’s absurd to suggest that proxies like tree rings can tell us things like, say, how much rain fell in California between, say, 913 and 933 AD. As is saying that because someone programmed a computer to predict more droughts in California in “the future”, a nice precise term, we know it will have more droughts. Is there a climate computer model out there that doesn’t predict that the weather will get worse if it warms? And of course everything bad gets worse:

“the warmer atmosphere is also supercharging atmospheric rivers as they move from the tropics to the West Coast, causing the ‘rivers in the sky’ to unleash more rain than they would on a planet untouched by human-made warming.”

Right. As we have pointed out, there was so much rain in California in 1850 that Sacramento became a “second Venice”. But back then there weren’t atmospheric rivers, just these air currents that carried huge amounts of water and then dumped it and made the Sacramento Valley into an inland sea. But shortly thereafter a ten-year drought basically wiped out all the cattle in southern and central California. Those being the good old days of mild weather and no fungus.