Did you hear the one about the 1 in 1000 year rainfall in South Carolina last week? It was all over the news. The Carolinas got a lot of rain. The sort of rainfall you only get “but once every thousand years.” Lots of talk, speculation, and climate cultists had their own worries. But before all of that gets out of hand, if we jump in our way-back machine and travel to 1916…
…you find more average rainfall in the same area, but 900+ years sooner than “but once every thousand years.”
So last week’s downpour might be a “but once in 100 years” thing plus or minus a year. It could be that it’s got nothing to do with thousands or hundreds, or the ravings of climate cultists, or much else. It might just be something that happens when the sun or the oceans do this or that whether there were SUV’s, Big Oil, evil corporations or climate deniers.
Every now and again it just rains a lot and it has nothing to do with fossil fuels or carbon credits or even the trans-gendered gnomes who conquered Atlantis before an excess of mammoth farts caused the seas to rise, requiring them to fly across the globe on a mission to exterminate them to save an island they stole from the indigenous pixies. Sadly, they were too late.
Don’t laugh; this was probably settled science back in the day.
Speaking of back in the day, RealClimateScience dug up this gem from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1871. (Emphasis, mine.)
“Three consecutive years of drought, while they have stimulated the inventive resources or practical agriculturalists, have had the natural effect of calling forth a plentiful crop of speculation from weather prophets, and projectors, and half-instructed meteorologists, and all the philosophic tribe of Laputa in general, to whom the periodical press now affords, such fatal facilities. We have often noticed that in the tabular statements of those compilers of weather records who write to the times, useful and welcome as their communications are, every season is sure to be “extraordinary,” almost every month one of the driest or wettest, or windiest, coldest or hottest, ever known. Much observation, which ought to correct a tendency to exaggerate, seems in some minds a tendency to increase it.”
Every season is sure to be extraordinary, be it 1871, 1916, or 2015, but the 21st century “weather prophets” have the benefit of tapping in to hundreds of millions of dollars offered annually to anyone willing to toe the government line.
To quote Alexander Pushkin, “if there happens to be a trough there will be pigs.”
These pigs are Climate cultists with government money who, with their media allies, are reducing every day to a sealed capsule in a vacuum with no connection to any other day or weather event in history. A floating island, as the essayist above observes, separated and independent from all other realities, where weather from 100 years ago is irrelevant because it is inconvenient to the narrative.
So what if 1000 years ago there were no man-made conditions upon which to blame the “but once in a thousand year rains,” the news cycle has defined the weather cycle and sold it as indisputable proof that man poses a danger to the climate.
The real danger is the climate cultists preaching their dogma, demanding that governments force you to tithe to their gods so that they might fill their own pockets then cry wolf at every bit of weather as a sign of the coming apocolypse. An apocalypse that can only be prevented by giving more and more of your money to them.
Anyone who dare question the wisdom of the Climate Pharisees, label them a denier and excommunicate them from the “debate” along with their heretical “facts” for no less than 100 years.
Many hat tips to RealClimatScience
