On my commute home last Friday I was listening to a story on NPR about the California drought/fires and because I listen to NPR every day, I knew what the story would morph into.

Starting at the 1:54 point of the audio, the NPR reporter setup John Laird, the secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency :

“NPR REPORTER – Is it clear to you that climate change is to blame for the drought and the heat and ultimately for these fires?”

“LAIRD – I think Climate Change is a major factor.”

I LOL’d in the car once my prediction came true but if you listen to NPR as much as I do, you know how in the tank NPR is for the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult.

And when NPR uses the term ‘climate change’, they’re not talking about the natural climate change that has happened on Earth for the past 4 billion years.  When NPR uses this phrase they mean the kind of climate change that is supposedly happening because of all the SUV’s we’re driving.

Unlike what happened in this NPR interview, I’d like to take a look at what the data actually tells us regarding the recent drought in California.

Here is a graph of annual rainfall in San Francisco from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and you can see that 2013 was indeed very low but 1 year does not make a trend and the overall trend line for the last 165 years is fairly flat (not a steadily decreasing trend that the AGW cult wants you to believe).

But that’s just one city in California, so here is a graph of annual rainfall in Los Angeles:

The trend line is basically flat for the past 130 years with the line having a negative slope of negative 6 thousandths of an inch. I call that flat and that means the annual rainfall in Los Angeles hasn’t changed in the past 130 years!

The wildfires seem to be confined to the San Diego area so let’s look at a graph of the annual rainfall for San Diego Lindbergh field:

You can see that over the past 48 years the trend line has a slope of negative 30 thousandths of an inch and for those who have trouble relating to such small measurements, that number approximately equates to width of 10 human hairs. Just like what we saw from the San Francisco and Los Angeles data, a flat trend line that means we haven’t seen significant rainfall decreases in San Diego.

Let’s not forget what happened in 1948 in California long before SUV’s were pumping CO2 into the atmosphere (h/t Steven Goddard):

And remember this New York Times article from 1994 (emphasis mine):

“BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.”

The data above paint a clear picture that there is no evidence that ‘climate change’ has had any impact to California precipitation and therefore there is no reason to make that claim.

It took me less than an hour to find the links and generate these graphs from readily available data on the internet but apparently the NPR reporter didn’t have that kind of time to fact check and challenge the claims of Mr. Laird. Or what was more likely the reason, the NPR reporter didn’t want to challenge these claims because the AGW lies support their Leftist agenda.

NPR is not the only MSM outlet that is in the tank for the AGW cult and remember this as we hear more ‘news’ reports that use any and every weather anomaly to push this AGW cult political agenda.

Don’t fall for it.

Go back to the data and find the answers for yourself.

You can’t rely on ‘journalists’ to do this for you.