Why California should store water, not panic about climate

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. Rep.Dave Min, a Democrat from Irvine, said that “climate change has wreaked havoc on us” because “it dried out the foliage.” Never mind that California had several wet winters in a row — a trend that has continued this year, with rainfall  around Southern California running well above average. State Sen.

Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, declared that the fires were proof of “the new normal in California” – and evidence that what Californians really need is a new law that would allow wildfire victims to sue oil companies for damages. “We are living in a new reality of extremes,” Gov.Gavin Newsom said before the smoke had cleared.

“Believe the science — and your own damn eyes.” Last week, at the Munich Security Conference, Newsom said people are “burning up, choking up, heating up” — as if wildfires did not occur before humans started using oil.In the past year, we’ve learned that the real cause of the wildfires was political incompetence.And we’ve learned that the “science” we’re supposed to “believe” isn’t always scientific. 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. Each week, the USDM produces a map showing which parts of the country are in drought, ranging from “abnormally dry” to “extraordinary drought.”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 — a remarkable doubling of the drought rate the USDM told users to expect from pre-2000 data.Alarming claims like these provide state officials ...