Despite media denials that “specific weather events [1]” can be linked to overall climate patterns, that is exactly what several major news outlets have done in the wake of deadly floods in Texas.
MSNBC, Huffington Post, The Dallas Morning News and other media have suggested global warming played a role in the torrential rain and consequent, deadly flooding in Texas during Memorial Day weekend. A year earlier many were blaming Texas’ drought on global warming.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews made this link during Hardball With Chris Matthews [2] May 26. He cited the National Climate Assessment, claiming that “climate change contributes to harsh climate conditions like the flooding in Texas and drought in California happening right now.”
He failed to admit that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report in December 2014 that said the opposite [3] regarding global warming and droughts in California. The report instead attributed the drought primarily to a La Nina weather pattern.
Matthews also interviewed Columbia University Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs, a man-made global warming alarmist. He said that “underlying warming of the sea surface and the land” led to “tragedies” like the flooding in Texas.
Sachs is a long-time crony [4] of left-wing billionaire George Soros. His “Millennium Village Project” received $50 million from Soros in 2008. Soros pledged in 2011 to contribute an additional $27 million during the next five years.
“This is going to be the hottest year on record,” Sachs also predicted. “There are massive heatwaves, there are droughts, there are floods.”
Huffington Post Green Editor James Gerken took the global warming connection a step further on [5] May 26, predicting more disasters to come. He claimed that increasing “extreme weather” around the world was being precipitated by a “hotter” planet, which he in turn attributed to “human activity.”
“At minimum, the recent downpours in Texas probably offer a glimpse of what certain parts of the U.S. can look forward to in the coming decades,” Gerken said.
Weatherbell meteorologist Joe Bastardi blasted [6] attempts to blame another weather disaster on global warming in a series of tweets from May 25 through May 27. In one tweet [7] May 27, Bastardi pointed out that proponents of global warming science had “reversed” their story, having previously claimed that climate change caused drought. He said that thunderstorms causing flooding was “nothing new.”
Bastardi said in another tweet that the "media reporting continues to ignore" that man-made global warming disasters had been repeatedly debunked.
“Despite its vociferous critics, An Inconvenient Truth, has stood the test of time,” Robberson said. “The deniers’ loud and repeated denials have not.”
Robberson obviously ignored analysis by experts [9] who found many inaccuracies in An Inconvenient Truth. Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray found 25 problems with the film, while Lord Christopher Monckton supplied his own list of 35 “errors.” Even former CNN meteorologist Rob Marciano, who is now with ABC, admitted “there are definitely some inaccuracies” in Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary.
The Christian Science Monitor [10], Slate Magazine [11] and Think Progress [12] also promoted the idea manmade climate change and the flooding in Texas were connected.
New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin took a slightly more moderate approach in a post [13] May 26. He affirmed his view that global warming is manmade and that it could lead to greater amounts of rainfall, but refrained from directly blaming climate for the Texas floods.
"Among the clearest outcomes of global warming are hotter heat waves and having more of a season's rain come in heavy downpours," Revkin said. "But the picture gets murkey, indeed nearly insoluble at the scale of states or smaller regions."