Soon after wildfires ripped through Los Angeles last year, California politicians and the media knew whom to blame: the oil companies whose product is supposedly driving climate change.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rep. Dave Min<\/a>, a Democrat from Irvine, said<\/a> that \u201cclimate change has wreaked havoc on us\u201d because \u201cit dried out the foliage.\u201d Never mind that California had several wet winters in a row \u2014 a trend that has continued this year, with rainfall\u00a0 around Southern California running well above average<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, declared<\/a> that the fires were proof of \u201cthe new normal in California\u201d \u2013 and evidence that what Californians really need is a new law that would allow wildfire victims to sue oil companies for damages.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are living in a new reality of extremes,\u201d Gov. Gavin Newsom<\/a> said before the smoke had cleared. \u201cBelieve the science \u2014 and your own damn eyes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Last week, at the Munich Security Conference, Newsom said people are \u201cburning up, choking up, heating up\u201d \u2014 as if wildfires did not occur before humans started using oil.<\/p>\n In the past year, we\u2019ve learned that the real cause of the wildfires was political incompetence.<\/a> And we\u2019ve learned that the \u201cscience\u201d we\u2019re supposed to \u201cbelieve\u201d isn\u2019t always scientific.\u00a0<\/p>\n Consider the U.S Drought Monitor (USDM), a team of federally funded researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.\u00a0<\/p>\n Each week, the USDM produces a map showing which parts of the country are in drought, ranging from \u201cabnormally dry\u201d to \u201cextraordinary drought.\u201d<\/p>\n From the time it began issuing these drought designations in 2000, through September 2025, the USDM has reported that California has been under drought conditions roughly 61 percent of the time \u2014 a remarkable doubling of the drought rate the USDM told users to expect from pre-2000 data.<\/p>\n Alarming claims like these provide state officials with the pretext \u2014 \u201cthe science\u201d \u2014 for a range of destructive climate change policies that have crippled California\u2019s energy and water infrastructure, leading directly to highest-in-the-nation fuel and water prices, and endangering the state\u2019s huge agriculture industry.<\/p>\n Attempting to test USDM\u2019s findings, my colleague Edward Ring and I could not reproduce USDM\u2019s most terrifying conclusions.\u00a0<\/p>\n First, the USDM team could not provide an algorithm that would allow independent researchers to test their weekly classifications \u2014 because there isn\u2019t one.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to note that USDM says<\/a> an algorithm isn\u2019t critical: Its researchers\u2019 job, it says, \u201cis to do something that a computer can\u2019t. When the data is pointing in different directions, they make sense out of it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That sort of \u201cscience\u201d sounds vulnerable to confirmation bias.<\/p>\n Ring and I also found that rainfall since 2000 is, in fact, only 1.4 percent lower than the 100-year average. On two other metrics \u2014 temperature and humidity \u2014 we saw virtually no change at all.<\/p>\n In short, despite the USDM\u2019s claims, California\u2019s climate \u2014 as measured by rainfall, temperature and humidity \u2014 is about the same today as it was in the early 1900s.\u00a0<\/p>\n Zeroing in on Los Angeles, we found that rainfall has been volatile \u2014 up and down \u2014 since official records were first kept in 1877. That suggests that what UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain<\/a> calls \u201chydroclimate whiplash\u201d \u2014 periods of drought followed by periods of heavy rain \u2014 isn\u2019t new, and isn\u2019t associated with industrial activity.\u00a0<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t, therefore, evidence of climate change.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even before weather records were kept, chroniclers reported a much worse case of \u201chydroclimate whiplash\u201d: After 43 days of intense rains<\/a> and flooding starting on Christmas Eve 1861, the state suffered a severe drought<\/a> in 1862 and 1863.\u00a0<\/p>\n From a policy standpoint, the results of such bias have been serious. Convinced that we are in an almost perpetual drought, state policymakers have pursued harsh water-rationing measures that make life difficult for agricultural and urban water users alike. Likewise, our governor and his allies in the legislature have tried to shut down the state\u2019s once-productive oil industry and committed the state to ending the sale of gas-powered vehicles within 10 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Eager to get in on the act, innumerable California cities and counties have tried to ban gas appliances \u2014 stoves, heaters and water heaters \u2014 in homes.\u00a0<\/p>\n A better approach is to understand that California rainfall is inherently volatile, and to ensure that we have sufficient water in drought years.\u00a0<\/p>\n But that would involve adding reservoir capacity, and building desalination plants along the Pacific Coast \u2014 reality-based measures that seem beyond the comprehension of Sacramento bureaucrats committed to their new faith: a religious-sounding \u201cbelief\u201d in unscientific \u201cscience.\u201d<\/p>\n