Hot and Cold, Wet and Dry

You know how the global warming thought police love to lecture dunderheads like myself, who have the temerity to cite contradictory evidence, that weather is local while climate change is not, whenever we point out actual, un-adjusted facts that

Dear President wiping global warming off his brow on a typical
summer day in Georgetown, Washington D.C..

haven't been pre-processed and blessed by climate change "scientists?" Of course, when one of their guys speaks up, it is quite different, particularly when the guy is President of the United States.

The last time California had severe and debilitating drought I lived there. It was the 1970s. Global cooling was the in vogue theory. Now we have another severe California drought and, assuredly, the cause is global warming. Just ask Barack Obama, who in college almost certainly never took a natural science class other than a required freshman survey course, if he didn't get a waiver from that.

"We can't think of this simply as a zero-sum game. It can't just be a matter of there's going to be less and less water so I'm going to grab more and more of a shrinking share of water," Obama said after touring part of a farm that is suffering under the state's worst drought in more than 100 years.

Wisconsin Avenue in Georegetown during
"Snowmaggedon" February 2010.

"Instead what we have to do is all come together and figure out how we all are going to make sure that agricultural needs, urban needs, industrial needs, environmental and conservation concerns are all addressed," he said.

Even if the U.S. takes immediate action to curb pollution, the planet will keep getting warmer for a long time to come because of greenhouse gases that already have built up, he said.

"We're going to have to stop looking at these disasters as something to wait for," Obama said, announcing more than $160 million in federal financial aid. The sum includes $100 million in the farm bill he signed into law last week for programs that cover the loss of livestock.

The package includes smaller aid amounts for the most extreme drought areas and to help food banks serving families affected by the water shortage. Obama also called on federal facilities in California to begin conserving water immediately.

"These actions will help, but they're just the first step," he said. "We have to be clear. A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods, are potentially going to be costlier and they're going to be harsher."

It must be because Barack Obama says so.

Meanwhile, here in Montana and Wyoming we are in the west as well. Montana alone (147,164 square miles) is 90 percent the size of California (163,696 square miles). Put together we (244,982 square miles) are 150 percent the size of California. We have a natural water storage system. It's called snowpack. We've got plenty of it.

All the major basins and drainages in Montana and Wyoming are above 100 percent of normal snowpack.  

These data are as of today. We are looking forward in western Montana to what local weather forecasters are describing as our biggest storm of the winter.  By Tuesday some of these basins should have a snowpack that's approaching 200 pecent. The cause must be global warming, don't you think?

Barack Obama is an arsonist in a field of straw men. God help us all.