Imagine you’re a climate expert working for a major news network when, one day, out of nowhere, Hillary Clinton announces that “MAGA Republicans” are causing the world to get hotter. Simply by voting the wrong way, and by cooking too many cheeseburgers, she says, these MAGA Republicans are lighting the planet on fire. They’re causing the warmest summer in the history of the world, going back billions of years, even before we had thermometers to measure this kind of thing. That’s how dangerous those MAGA Republicans are.
Last week we went into great detail about how Hillary Clinton sounded a lot like a Mesoamerican shaman when she made all those claims. But if you’re a climate expert in the mainstream media, you can’t laugh at what she said, as we did. You can’t just move on. Instead, you have to run cover for Hillary Clinton, because she’s effectively your boss. You revere her. Therefore, you have to go out on television and dutifully assert, with maximum confidence, that, yes, Hillary Clinton is right — we’re breaking temperature records right now, and that’s happening specifically because of man-made climate change that’s intensified in recent years.
Indeed, like lemmings, all the big networks came out and said this, one by one. Here’s ABC News for example, giving Hillary some much-needed backup:
The scientists are clear, say the climate experts. We just experienced the hottest July in the history of the planet because we’re polluting too much. Our carbon emissions are changing the weather in real-time. Notice they have the political analyst literally sitting next to the climate expert, just to underscore the point that this whole segment is about scaring as many Democrats as possible so that they vote in the next election. At this point, Joe Biden needs all the help he can get.
But wait a minute, skeptical viewers might ask. Aren’t there other periods in world history when temperatures have spiked — long before humans and even the dreaded “MAGA Republicans” existed? Could we be witnessing something caused by nature, instead of Trump voters? ABC News’ expert anticipated that you might start thinking along those lines. Here was her reply:
The expert is acknowledging that there have been periods throughout world history when the climate has gotten much warmer. But she says that was due to highly unusual events like “volcanic interruption.” And we don’t have that right now, the expert says — at least, not to any significant degree. So, she concludes, the Trump voters must be the problem.
Is that true? Admittedly, I’m not a climate scientist, or an Aztec shaman, or any kind of expert on the weather whatsoever. But I do pay attention to the news. And I couldn’t help but notice something that ABC’s crack climate team somehow forgot to mention.
Just a year and a half ago, this happened in the Pacific Ocean:
Well, that somehow went unnoticed over at ABC News. An underwater volcano erupted in Tonga. It was so big you could see it from space. The entire west coast of the U.S. was put under a tsunami warning. According to NASA, which wrote up a detailed analysis of the event last August, the eruption caused a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. The eruption also “blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere — enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools,” NASA says.
That’s significant, because according to NASA, volcanic eruptions normally cool the planet, by emitting a lot of dust particles that reflect sunlight away from the planet. That didn’t happen this time, and as one NASA scientist put it: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”
What’s the upshot? Well, water vapor traps heat. It’s the single most abundant greenhouse gas that exists in the atmosphere. It’s responsible for half of the greenhouse gas effect on the planet. So here was the prediction from NASA, as of last August. This is what they wrote. “The sheer amount of water vapor could be enough to temporarily affect Earth’s global average temperature.”
Oh. That seems like a major detail to leave out of literally every single news report on “historic climate change” this summer. It’s like reporting on wildfires without mentioning they were caused by arsonists — something our news media also does, regularly.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
Think about how extraordinary this is. A volcano just sent a massive amount of water vapor into the air — in what scientists are calling a once-in-a-lifetime event, which scientists say has clear ramifications for the climate — and they don’t even talk about it on ABC News. Democrats in the “party of science” blame MAGA Republicans, and no one in the mainstream media corrects them or mentions the billions of gallons of water vapor that was just spewed into the atmosphere by a volcano.
To be clear, this is not some temporary spike in temperatures that NASA was talking about. According to NASA, “excess water vapor injected by the Tonga volcano … could remain in the stratosphere for several years.” That was NASA’s projection in August of last year.
By December of 2022, it appeared that NASA’s prediction had been vindicated. Research published that month by the Meteorological Research Institute, NASA, and the University of Chicago confirmed that the eruption last year increased the mass of water vapor in the stratosphere by 13%. This water vapor will remain in the stratosphere for years — just as NASA had originally predicted.
The researchers added that, “The unique nature and magnitude of the global stratospheric perturbation by the [Tonga] eruption ranks it among the most remarkable climatic events in the modern observation era.”
Seven months later, this past July, the research meteorologist Ryan Maue had this response to the fallout from the eruption. “Based upon the last few months, it seems the effect of [the eruption] on global temperatures may have been greatly underestimated.”
Indeed, Ryan Maue was right. Just about two weeks ago, yet another paper came out on the eruption. This one was from researchers at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This paper found that the eruption sent 40 trillion gallons of seawater into the stratosphere — what the researchers called an “unprecedented water vapor injection.” Last week, Dr. Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at the independent nonprofit Berkeley Earth, reviewed these recent findings. He concluded that, “As a powerful greenhouse gas, this water may have contributed to recent warming.”
These seem like relevant developments, especially if you’re covering the MAGA heat wave that’s setting the United States on fire. And yet, virtually every major media outlet is ignoring this. We had to look at international media to find some coverage. Canada’s Global News is one of the few outlets that’s bothered to report on the connection between the volcanic eruption at Tonga and the heat wave this summer. Global News reported that “Tonga volcano eruption may have role in fueling summer heatwaves.” Watch how they frame it:
Notice what’s happening in that clip. It’s kind of amusing, really. They’re trying to downplay the impact of this eruption, because they want to keep beating the drum that climate change is man-made. At the same time, they can’t downplay the impact of any increase of average global temperatures, because we’re supposedly careening towards total climate apocalypse. It’s a tricky tightrope they’re walking.
But is the report correct when it says that the temperature increase from this volcano will be, “slight”? Are they right when they say that the temperature will go up by, “a few hundredths of a degree?”
Global News doesn’t show their work on that one. Meanwhile, scientists like Robert Rohde aren’t so sure. Here’s what he wrote on social media. “Is the water vapor injection from the [eruption] only adding a few hundredths of a degree to global temperatures …. or is it having more complicated effects we don’t yet understand? I don’t know, but I hope people are working on this.”
That’s an honest answer from a guy who, by the way, does not appear to be a conservative or even a “climate change skeptic.” So why is the media ignoring scientists like Robert Rohde? Why aren’t they telling you what NASA concluded, and what Cal Tech ultimately found to be true?
We all know the answer. The Democratic Party knows it stands a very real chance of losing control of the White House and the Senate in the next election. If they have to lie about MAGA Republicans changing the weather, they will do it. They will ignore the very climate science they claim to care so much about — the data straight from NASA — if it’s inconvenient.
In this case, the science is very inconvenient, from a political perspective, so they pretend it doesn’t exist. In a sane country, everything we’ve talked about here would be a major media scandal. They’ve spent months fueling panic over a heat wave, linking it to our SUVs and air conditioning units, while saying nothing at all about the volcanic eruption that we know is raising the global temperature. Has it made the temperature historically high? Highest in millions of years? Almost certainly not. That’s ridiculous. But that’s the point. The media is lying about the scope of the warming, and also lying about the cause of the warming — to whatever extent the warming is actually occurring.
For those of us who aren’t beholden to D.N.C. talking points or unhinged Hillary Clinton tweets, there’s an important takeaway from all of this. And that takeaway is simple. It’s been known for thousands of years. It’s this: However uncomfortable it may be, the truth is that, no matter how much we run our air-conditioning units or use plastic straws or whatever, vastly powerful forces outside of our control will ultimately determine the weather and the fate of the planet. The Left will never admit this because doing so would require recognizing the existence of a greater power — a force that, unlike leftism, is eternal.
Once you acknowledge that humans aren’t all-powerful — that they can’t change their gender at will, or control the weather on a whim — then their entire ideology falls apart. That’s what they’re afraid of. It’s not the fallout from the eruption at Tonga, as embarrassing as that may be for all their theories of “climate change.”
They’re panicked because their impotence — their inability to control nature — is now impossible to deny.