The Chu Effect

Lowell Ponte provides us with a tragicomic look at Red Barry's latest global warming chicken littlest:

The Golden State could become a desert wasteland, with no more winter salad greens from its parched Central Valley or wines from its withered Napa-Sonoma vineyards, before this century ends unless America takes drastic steps to slow global warming, warned U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

“We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,” Chu told The Los Angeles Times, adding, “I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

Cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego could become sandstorm-blasted ghost towns, Chu seemed to be saying.

January had been unusually dry, the start of a third dry year in a row for California. But soon after Chu's interview, rain began falling. Rainstorm after rainstorm – an average of one every two days – rolled across and drenched much of the state. By February 10, water-short San Diego had surged to two inches above its normal-to-date rainfall, and southland mountain ski lodges opened quickly.

This rain pattern continues, with huge storms expected to thicken the Northern Sierra snowpack that supplies much of California's water when it melts. The snowpack was only 61% of its usual thickness when Chu voiced concern about a drought.

“It's the Gore Effect,” says a laughing James Taylor, editor of the Heartland Institute think tank journal Environment & Climate News. “Almost every time global warming doomsayer Al Gore speaks or his movie is shown, unusual cold or blizzards happen. And now we have the Chu Effect. He warns of global warming-caused drought in California, and the heavens reply with almost nonstop rains. Maybe somebody up there is trying to tell us something.”

With little or no planetary warming since 1998, alarmists and climate opportunists point increasingly to brief regional droughts as second-hand evidence of global warming.

“It's amazing how many big-mouth global warming alarmists get media attention who were never trained as climatologists,” Patrick Michaels, a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, tells Newsmax. [emphasis added]

One cannot help but wonder why anybody still pays attention to these gross frauds.  In the story of the boy who cried wolf, it only took a few days for the townspeople to catch on to the fact that the boy was full of it and cease listening to him anymore.  Yet they've been shriek-peddling this "manmade climate change" BS for close to twenty years, and somehow, through sheer volume it's become the conventional "wisdom" - despite the embarrasing obviousness that the "emperor," as it were, has no clothes:

Chu is the latest example. He is a brilliant physicist who shared a 1997 Nobel Prize for his research into how to manipulate atoms with lasers. He has been director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley. But like most global warming doomsayers, Chu has no degree in atmospheric sciences, meteorology, or climatology.

Like many scientists eager to influence national policy, Chu became an outspoken activist in fields far from his expertise. He joined the Copenhagen Climate Council, a private collaboration between science and business to promote a 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in the Danish capital — and, it acknowledges, to use "emotional storytelling" about global warming.

I.e. Reckless, hysterical, irresponsible, flagrantly dishonest fearmongering designed to panic the public into a stampede toward coughing up their constitutional and economic liberties to fight a "crisis" that doesn't exist.  Judging by Chu-Chu's aforequoted ridiculous science fantasizing, we have little difficulty seeing why False Messiah dubbed him to be one of his false apostles.

And fear not, for Chu-Chu's ignorant hard-left pedigree is quite thorough:

Chu has been reluctant to embrace nuclear power, even though it emits no greenhouse gases, out of concerns with its waste and proliferation safety. He also finds problems with clean coal technologies, even though America's huge reserves make it “the Saudi Arabia of coal” and offer a clear path to energy independence.

“Coal is my worst nightmare,” says Chu, who describes the typical coal plant's radioactive fly-ash pollution as giving off a hundred times more radiation than a nuclear plant.

As an adviser, Chu may have influenced candidate Barack Obama's January 17, 2008, statement to the San Francisco Chronicle that he planned pollution taxes that would “bankrupt” anyone who tried to build a coal-powered plant.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in the burgeoning California Desert, you could say that to the degree that there is a "drought," it comes from the fact that there are thirty-six million people now living in California, and the obstacles to supplying that unprecedented water demand have nothing to do with smokestacks and carbon footprints and everything to do with dark robes:

Los Angeles gets most of its water from Northern California. L.A.'s biggest threat of water shortage comes not from drought but from Federal District Court Judge Oliver Wanger.

On September 1, 2007, this judge put strict limits on the pumping of water each December to June from the San Joaquin-Sacramento River delta to protect a 3-inch-long endangered fish, the Delta Smelt. This ruling costs Southern California up to 30% of what used to be its California Aqueduct water each year. (President George H.W. Bush appointed Wanger a federal judge in 1991.)

Therefore, the global warming alarmists are strangely correct. Man causes much of the water shortage in large areas of California — and that man is a federal judge.

Keep all this in mind when contemplating the fearmongering that propelled Hogzilla, and the "WE MUST ACT NOW!!!!!" hysterics that will power TARP II and Hogzilla II and more auto industry bailouts and whatever other "stimulus" hoaxes follow them, all in the name of an "economic recovery" that Red Barry's "climate change" schemes will pre-empt before it can ever get started.

Who knows, it might even lead to a regime-change in Washington in 2010 and 2012.  That's a crisis that really does need to be addressed ASAP.