Noah was more casual about the flood than the National Weather Service was about the impending “ice storm” that was poised to paralyze the metro last weekend and postpone the Chiefs’ game. As it turned out, it was the Steelers that paralyzed the Chiefs, and the Metro went about business as usual.
Refreshingly, the NWS’s Jared Leighton took responsibility for over-hyping Winter Storm Jupiter. Jupiter? “Yeah. I mean, we did,” the NWS’s Leighton told the Star. “There was a quarter-inch to a half-inch in the forecast, and there was a glaze of ice. Even if we were more conservative, it would have been an over-forecast.”
The NWS forecast and the media hysteria that surrounded it are indicative of a larger trend in weather forecasting, namely the classification of weather events as “extreme” to advance the climate change agenda. A quick Google search, for instance, of the words “climate change,” “California” and “drought” nets more than 10 million hits.
“Deniers would do well to read a recent UCLA study that indicates California’s current six-year severe drought could be exacerbated enough by global warming to extend the dry period for centuries,” opined the Los Angeles Times in September. Well, the dry period did not extend for centuries. It did not even extended for months. This winter it started raining again in California. Hard. Now, the problem for California is how to manage its reservoirs and for the alarmists where to find a new crisis. Fortunately, the bi-state area was unable to oblige.
