Jerry Brown hot and cold

Steven Goddard’s Real Science site has a hilarious update on the catastrophes attributed to global warming climate change (f/k/a global cooling). Goddard draws on the timely example of California’s current drought, exacerbated by California’s state government. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson’s “The scorching of Califoria” and, most recently, “An engineered drought.”

There is in the true sense nothing funny about it. In an almost unbelievable example of history rhyming, we have, courtesy of Goddard, Jerry Brown then and now: “40 years since climatologists blamed California drought on global cooling.”

In 1976 then Governor Brown warned that California’s drought threatened “a disaster of immeasurable magnitude.” The New York Times quoted climatologists attributing the drought to “global cooling.” Brown took the opportunity to tout “an era of limits.”

Now, of course, Brown is governor again and California is facing a catastrophic drought. Seemingly, some things never change. Here, however, we have repetition with a difference. Brown is somewhat chary about linking the current drought to global warming climate change, but, as the Atlantic’s Adam Chandler points out, he takes the crisis as an opportunity to push the standard proposals to deal with the alleged phenomenon. And only last month Brown appeared on ABC’s This Week with the Democratic Operative to proclaim that the unprecedented drought and newly enacted state water restrictions show that “climate change is not a hoax.”

The climate is always changing, but this proposition represents an eternal verity: whatever the problem, for liberals like Brown, government regulation and economic impoverishment are the solution.

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