After the floods had hit Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last week, former vice president and self-proclaimed global warming guru Al Gore coined the natural disaster as “one of the manifestations of climate change.” 

As The Washington Times notes, news articles followed with the same line. The New York Times wrote, “Flooding in the South looks a lot like climate change.” The Green Party of Louisiana declared a “climate state of emergency.” And at least one meteorologist said “we’ve reached a new meteorological era” because of global warming, or climate change… or whatever they call it now.

So, that’s settled, right? Not according to most experts. Some see no evidence that links this flood to climate change, unlike global warming alarmists.

“Some people say climate change is involved in every event. It is involved in every event, but how it’s involved in every event is beyond our comprehension right now,” said Chip Knappenberger, assistant director of CATO’s Center for the Study of Science. “It’s just not fair to say that it makes, quote, ‘bad’ events worse. That’s what they will have you believe, and that’s what Al Gore’s doing here, but it is far from scientifically proven or demonstrated that that is the case.”

Heritage Foundation fellow Nicolas Loris said, “For the Al Gores of the world, it’s convenient to point to the Louisiana floods, Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina or the tornado in Joplin, Missouri, as evidence of man-made global warming. The facts, on the other hand, are inconvenient.”

Meteorologist and global warming alarmist’s harshest critic Joe Bastardi recently wrote about the flooding in and around Baton Rouge, comparing it to previous floods and reminding that this isn’t even the worst that can happen (and it’s not dependent on climate change):

[Hurricane] Sandy was not the worst case scenario and certainly not the most extreme the atmosphere can produce. When looking objectively on this matter, we cannot underestimate what nature can do. Which is a big problem in the climate debate in that most people who don’t see things my way not only do not go back and look at what storms have actually done, they don’t understand why those events were not the worst case!

For Bastardi, he wonders why the current flood in Louisiana wasn’t worse, but the mere fact of its existence can’t be inextricably attached to Gore’s climate nonsense.

Bastardi also called out the NYT for its “alarmist tactics” found in recent headlines:

As far as summer 2016 being so warm, we’ve been there, done that. We forecasted it to be. Again, it wasn’t brain surgery given the El Niño coming on. The spike was forecasted and the cooling has started like it did before…

Meanwhile, The New York Times waited until summer when it’s hot and humid in the Northeast corridor to come out with a climate scaremonger piece… My point is that the heatwave was easy to see coming, but none of the Times folks had any forecast out. Instead they loitered until it got hot, at which point they authored a hype article about [how] hot it will be 50 years from now.

Included in these articles are maps of the United States with slowly encroaching red blotches as a dire warning that heat temps are going to ravage the southern region of the country in the coming decades. But Bastardi asks why models like these should be trusted in the wrong hands:

Models are tools for an answer. They are of no use if a) the person trying to use them does not know the inherent biases of the modeling, or b) is simply using the wrong tool for the problem at hand. To treat them as ends, not a means, is simply saying you don’t know what you are doing. Because if you did, you would be skeptical of any future projection simply by experience. You can use them, but if you are digging the ditch, don’t expect the shovel to work without the right ditch digger. But that ditch is not going to dig itself.

But then again, maybe Al Gore is just excited. It is the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, after all, and since he invented it, he’s probably just celebrating with something else he invented: global warming hype.