Detroit– In the wake of the Miami condo collapse June 29, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm suggested that rising seas caused by human-induced climate change was responsible. Citing her years of experience as Michigan governor from 2003-2011, she said she’d seen the same phenomenon in the Great Lakes.
“Michigan, where I’m from, we’ve seen the loss of beaches because the waters are rising, so this is a phenomenon that will continue,” she added, referring to the Lakes’ recent rise.
But this was a fib.
Climate Science 101 posits that shrinking – not rising – Great Lakes is a sign of global warming because the lakes are affected by evaporation and shrinking snow pack due to rising temps. The Green bible, the Third National Climate Assessment, predicts “declines of 8 inches to 2 feet” this century. Indeed, as Great Lake levels declined from 2000-2013 according to their usual 30-year cycle, Governor Granholm hyped retreating water levels as a global warming crisis – even imposing a moratorium on water-bottling plants and restricting Nestle Inc. from selling water out of state.
As lake levels returned to their cyclical highs over the last decade, Democratic pols and their media chorus have simply flipped the script – declaring rising lake levels a climate crisis.
America, if you liked COVID science, then you’ll love climate change science.
For the last 18 months public health officials and politicians have played politics with COVID science in order to justify government intrusion into every corner of American life. Red state governors imposed strict restaurant restrictions despite no evidence COVID was spreading in dining facilities. Public health officials from Dr. Anthony Fauci to the CDC urged those vaccinated to return to normal, then back-tracked and claimed recipients should still wear a mask. Experts maintained a steady diet of super-spreader fear-mongering in Florida, Texas, schools, and elsewhere should citizens resist the COVID health autocracy.
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Now Democrats are pivoting to climate “science” to justify sweeping government controls over American life.
Like coronavirus, the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions grants politicians enormous power because the greenhouse gas is the byproduct of virtually all daily activity including travel, food production, and construction.
By hyping catastrophic weather events as evidence of warming, the climate establishment hopes to keep the US population in the grip of fear. The Biden administration’s national infrastructure tour, for example, has turned into a climate fear tour as the administration pushes its Green New Deal taking over large sections of the economy.
Take the administration’s obsession with Michigan this summer. On a trip here July 8, EPA Chief Regan blamed flooding in Detroit – the result of years of infrastructure neglect by one of the country’s worst-run Democratic cities – on global warming.
"My team tells me . . . significant investments are needed to prepare (this) facility to withstand future storms, and other impacts from climate change, which we know are becoming more visible and more extreme," he said while touring the city’s Water Resource Recovery Facility.
Right on cue, Democrats’ media chorus – quoting only “experts” that fit the Party narrative - backed up the administration.
“The steady, sometimes heavy rains that once again caused flooding and chaos in metro Detroit last week show signs of being related to human-caused climate change,” scared The Detroit Free Press July 20, citing cherry-picked data from 1901-2015. The paper twisted itself into knots trying to square the circle that global warming causes both droughts and more precipitation in the summer.
In truth, top climatologists like University of Alabama-Huntsville Professor John Christy, who oversees global satellite temperatures, say the earth is warming out of a Little Ice Age that ended two centuries ago. Christy says there is no evidence of a man-made climate crisis.
“It depends on the period of time you look at,” said the veteran climatologist about Midwest rainfall patterns. “Over the last 40 years, there has been no upward trend. The data is ambiguous.”
Ambiguous data doesn’t scare voters into handing more power to Washington.
Detroit Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib turned up the volume at the July 8 event, declaring the climate crisis is racist: "Many of these infrastructures are in the backyard of communities of color, and they have to pay the brunt when we do not invest enough.”
Democrats and media have been hyping weather events as evidence of a crisis. Left-wing publication Bridge Michigan even took the opportunity of limestone rocks falling into Lake Superior – a phenomenon that’s occurred for centuries – as evidence of climate Armageddon.
“We don’t know if it’s tied to climate change,” Pictured Rocks Park chief of interpretation Susan Reece told Bridge, who nevertheless feared the erosion was caused by climate crisis-induced high lake levels.
Too much water from the heavens and in lakes has become this decade’s narrative of choice, a far cry from a 2007 New York Times headline that summed up that decades’ manufactured horror: “Water Levels in 3 Great Lakes Dip Far Below Normal.”
Fourteen years – and the natural Great Lakes climate cycle later – the narrative has flipped.
“Our jobs, economy, and public health depend on the preservation of The Great Lakes. Michigan has been experiencing extreme weather and the Great Lakes are under threat due to increasing climate change effects," Tiffany Brown, spokesperson for Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, worried to MLive.com last year about rising lake levels.
Right on cue, ex-governor and Secretary of Energy Granholm is due to visit the state this week to keep revving the panic pedal.
“I call it the unfalsifiable hypothesis,” said climatologist Christy. “This method says wait for something to happen and then claim that human-caused warming is to blame. Anything is possible, therefore nothing is testable. Whatever weather happens confirms their theory.”
Granholm’s tour will include GM’s Detroit Hamtramck plant that is manufacturing electric vehicles like the $80,000 GMC Hummer for well-to-do customers. The plant is surrounded by Detroit poverty – a city gripped in a true crisis of rising crime after Democrats’ narrative over the last year to defund police.
Payne is The Detroit News auto columnist and a syndicated cartoonist with Andrews McMeel.
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