Retroactively changing the causal mechanism for a forecast from forty years ago which has been proven correct based on the original hypothesis

From India’s Terrifying Water Crisis by Meera Subramanian. The subtitle is:

To survive the climate emergency, India needs the collective power of small-scale, nature-based efforts.

I am good for the first three paragraphs.

India’s water crisis offers a striking reminder of how climate change is rapidly morphing into a climate emergency. Piped water has run dry in Chennai, the southern state of Tamil Nadu’s capital, and 21 other Indian cities are also facing the specter of “Day Zero,” when municipal water sources are unable to meet demand.

Chennai, a city of eight million on the Bay of Bengal, depends on the fall monsoon to provide half of the city’s annual rainfall. Last year, the city had 55 percent less rainfall than normal. When the monsoon ended early, in December, the skies dried up and stayed that way. Chennai went without rain for 200 days. As winter passed into spring and the temperature rose to 108° F, its four water reservoirs turned into puddles of cracked mud.

Some parts of the city have been without piped water for five months now. Weary women with brightly colored plastic jugs now await water tankers, sometimes in the middle of the night. On June 20, the delayed summer monsoon arrived as a disappointing light shower.

But then there is the jarring introduction of statist ideology (AGW) into an otherwise real issue.

But to even consider surviving the climate emergency underway, India needs more than megaprojects. It needs the collective power of abundant, small-scale, nature-based efforts to seize the seasonal bounty across the diverse landscape of South Asia.

AGW/Climate Change/Climate emergency. The names change but the statist vision remains the same.

Subramanian's position would have greater credibility if we weren't talking about the anticipated water crisis forty years ago, long before AGW hijacked environmentalism.

The discussion then proceeded from the observation that the world was urbanizing and developing, leading to greater water needs in more concentrated geographies. The concern was multi-fold. There was talk that all future wars would be over access to water just as in the past they might have been over oil or agricultural land, etc. There was the concern about reservoirs and tapping natural riverine sources and how that would cause environmental catastrophe. There was concern about tapping impermeable and non-replaceable geological reservoirs. There was concern about the cost and technology of water treatment.

Basically it was an anticipated issue and the argument had nothing to do with AGW. Much of what was hypothesized forty years has come about and for the reasons originally hypothesized. We are dramatically more urbanized, dramatically more densified. We are much more dependent on frequently variable water sources.

The fact that the old theory came true does not preclude AGW from also being true. But it is irrelevant. And indeed, ideologically suspicious. Why raise AGW if the known conditions and known forecast were made regardless of AGW?

More and more people are beginning to acknowledge that the AGW argument is simply a mask for statism. And I don't mean more opponents are acknowledging it. More proponents are acknowledging that the environmental packaging is simply a camouflage for the purpose to advance statism.

As Saikat Chakrabarti recently acknowledge on Capitol Hill, the Green New Deal was never intended to address enviornmental concerns. As reported in National Review from an interview in the Washington Post

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts, according to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting for a profile published Wednesday.

“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added.

Which seems to echo Subramanian

At a time when America’s eco-resolve is in tatters, India has the opportunity to step up and be a pioneer, rewriting the human development script for the 21st century and growing a new economy on a foundation of green growth. Now is the time to look to the knowledge of earth systems that we are so quickly altering if there is any hope of quenching our undying thirst.

It was never about the environment, it was always about statist power.

But in pursuing greater statism, the ideologues have made it that much harder for traditional environmentalists.