“The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier … something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.”

That was California Gov. Gavin Newsom responding to Donald Trump, but not last week in Los Angeles when the president came to survey the devastation in Los Angeles. Newsom was speaking in September of 2020 when wildfires ravaged more than four million acres of the Golden State.
“Please remember the words, very simple. Forest management. Please remember that,” Trump told the governor. “When you have years of leaves, dried leaves on the ground, it just sets it up. It’s really a fuel for a fire,” with brush and dead trees functioning “like a matchstick.” That brought a response from Newsom’s natural resources secretary, Wade Crowfoot.
“If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians,” said Crowfoot, who earned degrees in political science and public policy. Crowfoot, a former cabinet secretary for Gov. Jerry Brown and West Coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund, did not spell out the science of climate change. To qualify as science, the hard data would have to be submitted to others for replication.
In 2021, California wildfires burned 8,834 acres, with 7,490 acres in 2022, followed by another 7,127 acres in 2023. Newsom and Crowfoot did not outline any changes in forest management, or explain how climate change dogma had helped them protect Californians.
As it turned out, May 5, 2024, was the snowiest day of the 2023-24 season, with an accumulation of 26.4 inches. The deep snowcap and plunging temperatures brought no response from Newsom, who in May planned a trip to the “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resistance” conference at the Vatican. According to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “The Climate Crisis is upon us. It will get a lot worse over the next few decades as planetary h...