Soon after wildfires ripped through Los Angeles last year, California politicians and the media knew whom to blame: the oil companies whose product is supposedly driving climate change.
Rep. Dave Min, a Democrat from Irvine, said that “climate change has wreaked havoc on us” because “it dried out the foliage.” Never mind that California had several wet winters in a row — a trend that has continued this year, with rainfall around Southern California running well above average.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, a Democrat from San Francisco, declared that the fires were proof of “the new normal in California” – and evidence that what Californians really need is a new law that would allow wildfire victims to sue oil companies for damages.
“We are living in a new reality of extremes,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said before the smoke had cleared. “Believe the science — and your own damn eyes.”
Last week, at the Munich Security Conference, Newsom referred to people “burning up, choking up, heating up” — as if wildfires did not occur before humans started using oil.
In the past year, we’ve learned that the real cause of the wildfires was political incompetence. And we’ve learned that the “science” we’re supposed to “believe” isn’t always scientific.
Consider the U.S Drought Monitor (USDM), a team of federally funded researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Each week, the USDM produces a map showing which parts of the country are in drought, ranging from “abnormally dry” to “extraordinary drought.”
From the time it began issuing these drought designations in 2000, through September 2025, the USDM has reported that California has been under drought conditions roughly 61 percent of the time — a remarkable doubling of the drought rate the USDM told users to expect from pre-2000 data.
Alarming claims like these provide state officials with the pretext — “the science” — for a range of destructive climate change policies that have crippled California’s energy and water infrastructure, leading directly to highest-in-the-nation fuel and water prices, and endangering the state’s huge agriculture industry.
Attempting to test USDM’s findings, my colleague Edward Ring and I could not reproduce USDM’s most terrifying conclusions.
First, the USDM team could not provide an algorithm that would allow independent researchers to test their weekly classifications — because there isn’t one.
It’s important to note that USDM says an algorithm isn’t critical: Its researchers’ job, it says, “is to do something that a computer can’t. When the data is pointing in different directions, they make sense out of it.”
That sort of “science” sounds vulnerable to confirmation bias.
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Ring and I also found that rainfall since 2000 is, in fact, only 1.4 percent lower than the 100-year average. On two other metrics — temperature and humidity — we saw virtually no change at all.
In short, despite the USDM’s claims, California’s climate — as measured by rainfall, temperature and humidity — is about the same today as it was in the early 1900s.
Zeroing in on Los Angeles, we found that rainfall has been volatile — up and down — since official records were first kept in 1877. That suggests that what UCLA climate researcher Daniel Swain calls “hydroclimate whiplash” — periods of drought followed by periods of heavy rain — isn’t new, and isn’t associated with industrial activity.
It isn’t, therefore, evidence of climate change.
Even before weather records were kept, chroniclers reported a much worse case of “hydroclimate whiplash”: After 43 days of intense rains and flooding starting on Christmas Eve 1861, the state suffered a severe drought in 1862 and 1863.
From a policy standpoint, the results of such bias have been serious. Convinced that we are in an almost perpetual drought, state policymakers have pursued harsh water-rationing measures that make life difficult for agricultural and urban water users alike. Likewise, our governor and his allies in the legislature have tried to shut down the state’s once-productive oil industry and committed the state to ending the sale of gas-powered vehicles within 10 years.
Eager to get in on the act, innumerable California cities and counties have tried to ban gas appliances — stoves, heaters and water heaters — in homes.
A better approach is to understand that California rainfall is inherently volatile, and to ensure that we have sufficient water in drought years.
But that would involve adding reservoir capacity, and building desalination plants along the Pacific Coast — reality-based measures that seem beyond the comprehension of Sacramento bureaucrats committed to their new faith: a religious-sounding “belief” in unscientific “science.”
Marc Joffe is a visiting fellow at the California Policy Center. He is the co-author of “A statistical review of the United States Drought Monitor.”
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