Culture > Climate Change Hoax

Prisoners of Meteorology

Lying about weather history for political gain is nothing new. 

Mark C. Ross | April 24, 2026

Lying about weather history for political gain is nothing new. An ambitious engineer named William Mulholland concocted a phony drought back in the 1890s to urge passage of a bond measure to finance the construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the fraud was discovered when a graduate student in geography at UC Berkeley named Scott Stine used tree ring analysis to unravel the truth.

Meanwhile, the development of the water resource allowed Los Angeles to eclipse San Francisco as California’s prime city. SF’s water ambitions were delayed by a transplanted Scotsman named John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club to prevent construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam on the Tuolumne River. Although the dam was eventually built, the damage was already done. This is all spelled out in Water and Power by William H. Kahrl, who was also the unofficial dean of California hydrologists.

Fast forward to our current situation. Rather than a particular individual creating a hoax to further a specific agenda item, an entire political movement is trying to dominate many aspects of private life, especially regarding the consumption of energy. Mulholland got away with his subterfuge because most of the voters in Los Angeles at that time had moved there after his phony drought was supposed to have........

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