Were the deadly Texas floods that struck on the Fourth of July the product of manmade global warming and Trump budget cuts? The fake news media sure wants you to come to that conclusion.
The first report I saw on the tragedy was in the Washington Post on the morning of July 5. As the newspaper has for decades been a fierce propagandist in favor of what President Trump calls the “climate hoax,” I expected it to be the first to try linking the flooding with global warming.
Instead, the Post placed the tragedy in the context of a deadly flash flooding incident that occurred in the same region in July 1987: “Ten teenagers were killed and 33 others were injured on July 16, 1987, when a bus and van leaving a church camp encountered floodwaters caused by 5 to 10 inches of rainfall in the upper headwaters of the Guadalupe River basin.”
So it wasn’t global warming. A similar event had happened before. In fact, much worse flooding had occurred more than a century earlier in July when the Guadalupe River had risen by a whopping 42.3 feet.
The New York Times was the first major media outlet to try linking the flooding with global warming by claiming that warming had caused rainfall to intensify, a claim that the Washington Post would surface again a few days later. But the claim doesn’t jibe with research reporting that rainfall intensity actually declined on a global basis during the period 1975-2022.
Media and activist efforts to link the flooding with global warming then shifted toward attributing the event directly to warming. The activists at ClimateCentral.org held a webinar in which they featured Friederike Otto, chief of a group called World Weather Attribution (WWA).
The group, founded with a $10 million grant from climate hysteria supporter and Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, regularly attempts to claim that specific weather events are made more likely by global warming. But they have the process of science exactly backward.
If Otto and her colleagues at WWA actually understood climate science, they would be able to predict natural disasters ahead of time. You know you understand the relevant science when you can make predictions based on your knowledge. But climate alarmists can’t make predictions because they don’t actually understand climate science. They are, in fact, nothing more than propagandists making unfounded and unverifiable claims.
The most recent effort I saw trying to link the flood with global warming was by some Wall Street Journal reporters whose spin was that global warming didn’t cause the heavy rains, but they contributed to them. But this claim isn’t supported by history. The Guadalupe River rose as high as 37.5 feet on July 4. But it rose by 42.3 feet in the July 1869 flood.
Finally, flash flooding in Texas doesn’t correlate with emissions. So there is no there, there for climate activists trying to exploit the tragic flooding. It goes without saying that Bill Nye the Science Guy’s claim on CNN that the future floods could be prevented if we “stopped using fossil fuels” is imbecilic.
As to the local warning system, that obviously failed. But climate propagandists have been trying to pin the blame on the Trump administration’s staff reductions and budget cuts for the National Weather Service (NWS). But the NWS had plenty of staff and the warnings were given before the event and without negligence.
As the Washington Post reported: “Meteorologists who spoke with The Washington Post said the Weather Service meteorologists appeared to do what they were supposed to do to develop an accurate forecast and relay it to the public. They said the agency made reasonable predictions based on the information it had.”
Rather than blame things and people who bear no responsibility for the tragedy on the Fourth, we should investigate what happened and see how flash flooding systems and regional safety can be improved. I’m confident we will be able to do that once we cut through the flood of politicized disinformation.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer, publishes JunkScience.com and is on X @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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