Do they read what they write?

I read a story in the Los Angeles Times last week, clearly written for the purpose of declaiming against the horrors of “climate change,” that was so strange that I wondered about the sanity of the writer, and of the people he was writing about.

That is not to say that I am a “climate change denier.” I am not. But facts are too few on the ground for me to have any opinion on the subject. Too many purported “facts” are belied by the clear evidence that is visible in nature right in front of my eyes. “These glaciers will have disappeared by the year 2000.” In 2023 they are still there, and nowhere near disappearing. Other facts appear to be quite possibly true. I remain neutral. I need better evidence than what is presently available.  

But back to the article. The writer starts by stating that, “As a kid in Miami, I thought I knew heat.” He follows that with, “As an adult in Los Angeles, I thought I knew heat,” and a dramatic description of a Los Angeles summer that makes LA sound hotter than my memories of Tucson, AZ.

Then he drops the bomb. “But never have I felt anything like Death Valley last week,” he says, “where the temperature climbed to 128 degrees, within striking distance of the all-time world record the valley set in 1913 — 134 degrees.”

Think about what he says. What was the atmospheric content of CO2 in 1913? And yet Death Valley was a full 6 degrees hotter 110 years ago than it was is on the day which he cites. A day, he writes, of catastrophic heat due to the human race adding CO2 to Earth’s atmosphere. So if we are warming the planet we have, by his own statement, not yet managed to warm it back up to where it was more than a century ago.

What made it so hot 110 years ago? What caused it to cool down? If it cooled down a century ago, why is it not possible that it might not do so again? Maybe for the same reasons that caused it to cool down back then. Why is no one looking into that?

He goes on to tell of a 71-year-old man he met who was hiking across the valley. The man had one liter of water with him, which he claimed was sufficient for the day. It wasn’t, of course, and the man was found dead of dehydration that evening. Why are we so stupid these days? I knew as a teenager that hiking in the desert needed far more water than that.

His comparison of heat records to those of a century ago is not by any means uncommon. Climate change writers do it extremely often, citing “the highest temperature in a hundred years,” and they never seem to realize that the citation invalidates the very point that they are trying to make. If you're trying to sound an alarm about the planet warming, why are you telling me that it was 6 degrees hotter 110 years ago than it is today?

My point has less to do with “climate change” than it does with that it seems to me that today’s writers just aren’t very bright these days. Like drawing a contrast between Death Valley, Miami and Los Angeles. Why would anyone find it remarkable that an inland desert is hotter than two coastal cities?