May 5 was the snowiest day of California’s 2023-2024 season, with an accumulation of 26.4 inches. The UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab also pegged March 3 as the second-snowiest day, with 23.8 inches, forcing motorists to put on chains. Furnaces were firing up and there was no need for air conditioning in the Central Valley, which is normally quite hot in May.

The sudden chill and record snowfall brought no pronouncement from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who believes the world is getting hotter. As temperatures plunged, Gov. Newsom was planning a trip to the May 15–17 “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience” conference at the Vatican.

According to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “The Climate Crisis is upon us. It will get lot worse over the next few decades as planetary heating shoots past 1.5C by early 2030s. The warming curve is likely to bend around the latter half of this century in response to global scale actions to mitigate emissions of the heat trapping pollutants. We no longer have the luxury of relying just on mitigation of emissions. We need to embark on building climate resilience so that people can bend the emissions curve and bounce back from the climate crisis safer, healthier, wealthier to a sustainable world,” and so on.

The climate “crisis”—formerly known as “global warming”—is a matter of debate; there are challenges to the “hockey stick graph” of allegedly rising temperatures. Nonetheless, for the Vatican, this seems to be a matter of dogma—the same is true of Gov. Newsom, who is not a scientist.

‘Something Happened to the Plumbing of the World’

Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship” and graduated in 1989 with a degree in political science—which is not the same as empirical science, a matter of measurement, testing, and replication. The debates on global warming seem to have passed by the governor. In 2021, when much of California was ablaze, Gov. Newsom blamed climate change.

“The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier,” Gov. Newsom explained, “something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.” According to Wade Crowfoot, Gov. Newsom’s natural resources secretary, “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.” Those vulnerable Californians had cause to wonder.

Wade Crowfoot graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1996 with a degree in political science and, in 2004, earned his master’s degree in public policy—not atmospheric science. Crowfoot was deputy cabinet secretary to Gov. Jerry Brown and served as West Coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Secretary Crowfoot and Gov. Newsom seem unaware of studies such as the 2019 California Wildfires: Key Recommendations to Prevent Future Disasters, which faulted state and federal agencies “for allowing fuel conditions to persist that enabled so many wildfires to reach epic proportions.” Recommendations include proactive forest management; more prescribed or controlled burns, and allowing property owners “to more easily remove trees and provide active forest management through forest thinning and the creation of breaks, especially near communities.”

Such common-sense measures have found little favor with the California government, which remains shrink-wrapped in climate-change dogma. For his part, Gov. Newsom is locked into other views that might seem out of step with the Vatican.

Newsom Breaks From Rome for Political Gain

Santa Clara University bills itself as “the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley,” that is to say, a Catholic institution. In March, the Vatican announced that “in the era of universal human rights, there can be no ‘right’ to take a human life,” and “in this phase of history, the protection of life becomes an absolute priority.” For Gov. Newsom, the absolute priority is abortion at any time, for any reason.

The literature on abortion includes books such as Aborting America, by former abortionist Bernard Nathanson, and recent advances in surgery on the unborn. Those realities seem to have bypassed Gov. Newsom, a father of four.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution says nothing about abortion, a matter for the states to decide. Following that decision, as Mary Theroux noted, “many seized the opportunity to grandstand politically—and none so blatantly as California’s Governor Newsom. Newsom has run billboard ads in 18 states to promote California as an abortion sanctuary and launched a website. That goes far beyond the notion that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

For Gov. Newson, unrestricted abortion is a dogma. So is climate change, even when the facts go against it, as they did in California on a chilly May weekend. If Californians thought the governor puts politics over facts it would be hard to blame them.