Brave beginnings

Good lord!  Is sanity returning to the mainstream media?  There is still much momentum from MSM journalists in support of anti-empiricism, illogic, and irrationality that the answer would have to be no, but maybe the red brick wall is beginning to crumble.

Despite the durable adage that weather is not climate, the MSM constantly offers up weather events as evidence of global warming.  And it really doesn't matter what the weather might be, it is evidence of global warming.  If you believe hard enough.  NPR, New York Times, The Atlantic, they all commit this crime against reason routinely.

But maybe there is yet hope.  From For all their ferocity, California storms were not likely caused by global warming, experts say by Louis Sahagun.

This is of course, not news.  Weather is never climate.  But the MSM have not been in the habit of reporting accurately.  I hope there are no negative repercussions to Louis Sahagun for reporting the truth.

As California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic rains the state has experienced throughout its history and not the result of global warming.

Although scientists are still studying the size and severity of storms that killed 19 people and caused up to $1 billion in damage, initial assessments suggest the destruction had more to do with California’s historic drought-to-deluge cycles, mountainous topography and aging flood infrastructure than it did with climate-altering greenhouse gasses.

Although the media and some officials were quick to link a series of powerful storms to climate change, researchers interviewed by The Times said they had yet to see evidence of that connection. Instead, the unexpected onslaught of rain and snow after three years of punishing drought appears akin to other major storms that have struck California every decade or more since experts began keeping records in the 1800s.

[snip]

“A group I call ‘mediaologists’ always hype the current situation to make it seem worse than the last one,” Gershunov said, using a pithy play on the word meteorologists.

 Sahagun goes out of his way in the article to repeat the catechism many times that the long term threat of anthropogenic global warming is real.  However, in the real world, the sane world, it is clear that that assertion is at best debatable, depending as it does for its catastrophic forecasts on assumptions hard baked into the model itself.  

But to even acknowledge even peripherally that weather is not climate, that this weather in particular is well within historic norms and that the West has always been prone to long cycles of drought and flood having nothing to with man or CO2?  That takes a brave journalist.

Is the claim that human-caused CO2 emissions are the temperature dial vacuous?  No.  Just not proven and with a lot of contra-evidence which is not acknowledged.  The real question is:  "Given the longterm cycles of flood and drought in the Western states (predating man), is there any empirical evidence that CO2 levels are exacerbating those already existing cycles? 

Baby steps.  Just acknowledging that weather is not climate is a good beginning.