The times have changed. The Beach Boys have been replaced by Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Rather than singing about fun-fun-fun, they sing about guilt-guilt-guilt over destroying the planet. The temperatures have also changed in California.

California is the land of endless summer. The Beach Boys are catching a wave in front of bikini-clad girls with bushy, bushy blonde hairdos under the warm California sun. The Beach Boys were writing music long before global warming became a thing. In those days, Oscar winners were thanking all the little people for helping them win an award, not preaching to those same little people about climate change and our Cro-Magnon president.

If Al Gore and Alexandria Occasional-Cortex are to be believed, the beaches of Malibu and Santa Cruz should be solid glass, after global warming melted the sand and boiled the Pacific Ocean. Yet it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

The Los Angeles Times recently reported how cold February was, not reaching 70 degrees even once during the entire month. They bemoaned the poor coastal restaurants that needed portable heaters to warm waiters and diners eating outdoors, a staple of Southern California dining.

They didn’t mention how the heaters were powered. Given that this is California, I was hoping the heaters were wind or solar powered, but I suspect they ran on kerosene or some other evil fossil fuel that would be verboten under the Green New Deal. I’m surprised there was not enough hot air from the recent Oscar awards ceremony to heat the city.

Imagine in ten years when AOC is Speaker of the House and California is renamed Cortezafornia. Will the outdoor restaurants be required to have a set of pedals under each seat for diners to pedal furiously, powering a human-powered heater?

The LA Times notes the month of below 70 degree temperatures is a record dating back 132 years, “since forecasters began recording data.” These myopic journalists don’t realize that LA has been around for more than 132 years. I suspect if one were to look back hundreds, thousands, or millions of years, there would be months far cooler than this past February, and far warmer than anything recorded in the past 132 years.

Given that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, it’s the ultimate in hubris to believe that the time we happen to inhabit the Earth represents “normal.” Modern journalism and hubris are synonymous. If you don’t believe me, just read CNN’s Jim Acosta’s Twitter feed.

Los Angeles even had a bit of snow. This causes a National Weather Service meteorologist to remark, “We’ve had cold mornings and freeze conditions, but I don’t remember seeing anything quite this cold.” I don’t recall any Beach Boys songs about Southern California snow.

Despite the chilly temperatures in Los Angeles, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. East of LA it is snowing, allowing the ever-adaptable human species to trade their surfboards for snowboards. The LA Times consoles readers, “Back-to-back winter storms this year have blanketed California’s mountain ranges with snow.”

California skiers aren’t pondering “The end of snow” that the New York Times predicted in 2014.

Instead they are enjoying lots of snow, 8 feet at Mountain High Resort and 10 feet at Big Bear, “The best conditions for snow sports in roughly a decade.”

Of course, the climate warriors attribute the cold weather to global warming, or if they don’t want to be laughed at, to the new term of climate change. The latter is a much broader catch-all phrase to cover all manner of weather. Warmer, cooler, wetter, drier, more storms, fewer storms are all evidence of a changing climate in their view.

And all caused by President Trump and those wearing MAGA hats, when not supposedly assaulting Hollywood actors in Chicago during a recent spell of bitterly cold climate change.

Washington Post Screen grab

Further up the left coast, Seattle hasn’t been spared from this winter’s climate change. Seattle experienced its snowiest February in 70 years. Skiers in Lake Tahoe will have some extra ski days due to record snowfall.

In my neck of the woods in Denver, it’s a familiar headline this weekend, “A storm will unleash accumulating snowfall and travel disruptions across Colorado early this weekend before brutal, record-challenging cold arrives.”

And to think just 5 years ago we were worried about the end of snow. Far from it. Some winters in Colorado, and elsewhere, are snowier than others or drier than others. They all seem to run in cycles that climate scientists and their computer models are unable to predict. Some cycles are shorter, and others longer. There are little ice ages and long ice ages.

Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” about 200 years ago. He described cold snowy Christmases in London at that time, “Including one in the winter of 1813-14 during which the ice on the River Thames was thick enough to bear the weight of an elephant.” The cold climate of early 19th century England changed, and will change again.

Scientists discovered a fossilized tropical forest in Arctic Norway, trees that normally grow near the equator. How could that be? CBS News, in an accidental moment of thoughtful journalism, wrote, “55 million years ago the Arctic was once a lot like Miami, with an average temperature of 74 degrees, alligator ancestors and palm trees.”

My question is which scenario is normal for Planet Earth – a balmy Arctic Ocean that we could swim in or the same ocean covered in ice and bitterly cold? If we don’t know which is considered normal, how can we know what is abnormal? Or are both normal, just cyclical.

Other inconvenient questions are how did the climate change? What melted glaciers ending past ice ages? What caused sufficient cooling to bury Chicago under a mile of ice? Where are we now in these repeating cycles of warming and cooling?

And what gives politicians the arrogance to think they can control the climate through the Green New Deal or other tax and regulation schemes?

The Washington Post, one minute braying about global warming then another minute writing about an upcoming deep freeze for the entire nation, “Records for cold are likely to be most numerous in the north-central United States but will extend from coast to coast.”

Scientists must deal with data that contradicts their original hypothesis, changing their assumptions, collecting new data, and determining whether a new hypothesis more accurately predicts future events. Otherwise they do a faceplant every time the weather demonstrates the folly of their bloviations.

Brian C Joondeph, MD, MPS, a Denver based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.