Dana Bash and Bill Nye 'the Science Guy' ignore history to pin Texas tragedy on Trump and oil
The catastrophic floods in Central Texas have claimed the lives of at least 120 people, including 46 children. As officials and volunteers continue their search for the 173 still believed missing, liberals continue to spin the tragedy, exploiting Texans' loss and grief for political ends.
This was especially clear Wednesday on CNN, where talking head Dana Bash and Bill Nye "the Science Guy" suggested that the Trump administration and American energy were somehow culpable for the flooding in Texas and North Carolina as well as the rains in Chicago.
At the outset of the interview, Bash insinuated both that floods are becoming more frequent and that they are the result of climate change — even though in the case of Texas, they took place in a region that earned the nickname "flash flood alley" with a pattern of heavy flooding that apparently predates the combustion engine by many centuries.
Political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. recently directed the attention of USA Today to a 1940 historical text on American floods that indicates "the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bull's-eye for flash flooding."
A century before that text was published, German immigrants in New Braunfels, Texas, reportedly had to contend with the same problem — and faced a Guadalupe River that would consistently rise 15 feet above its normal stand following heavy rains.
"The documented record of extreme flooding in 'flash flood alley' goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past," said Pielke.
"It's terrible," said Bash, referring to footage of flooding. "You keep hearing 'once in a lifetime,' 'once in a hundred years,' 'once in a thousand years.' At this point, it's not any more. It's just where we are with the climate and the environment."
After suggesting that "warm weather events are actually easier to tie to climate change," Nye — who for all his honorary doctorates has not earned a doctorate in any scientific field — said, "'What are we going to do about it?' is the ancient question. And [the answer] would be to stop burning fossil fuels."
"When you're in a hole, stop digging, and so on," continued Nye. "But the fossil fuel industry has been very successful in getting organizations like the U.S. Congress to think that it's really not happening."
After Nye smeared a critical source of American energy, Bash proved eager to tie its survival to President Donald Trump, stating, "And the first six months of the Trump administration, we've seen an end to some of the federal efforts on not just fossil fuel but other efforts that had been in place government-wide to promote alternative energy."
'If we harness our outrage and come together to fight like hell for our collective future, we will win.'
Failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg noted in a Tuesday op-ed that elected officials owe the Texas families who lost love ones "a sincere commitment to righting their deadly wrong, by tackling the problem they’ve turned their backs on for too long: climate change."
"The latest episode of horrific flooding isn't just about a natural disaster in one state," continued Bloomberg, who has poured cash into various climate alarmist initiatives. "It's also about a political failure that's been happening in states across the country, and most of all in Washington. The refusal to recognize that climate change carries a death penalty is sending innocent people, including far too many children, to early graves."
Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club and former CEO of the NAACP, claimed in a Chicago Sun-Times piece that the Texas disaster "was a crisis written by the climate crisis and made far worse by the types of policies being pushed by this administration everyday [sic]."
Jealous, like Bloomberg and Nye, appears to think the flood a good enough excuse for Americans to join their war on fossil fuels, stating, "If we harness our outrage and come together to fight like hell for our collective future, we will win."
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