From Watts Up With That?

By Anthony Watts

The British rag, er, Newspaper, The Guardian has spent years proving that no subject is too absurd to connect to climate change. Here’s some of their greatest hits.

• OnlyFans? Climate change.
• Illegal immigrant deportation flights? Climate change.
• Earth waving a “white flag of surrender” because of melting ice? Climate change.

If someone burns toast in London, you half expect a Guardian “journalist” to blame rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. That is why its latest complaint is so unintentionally hilarious.

The Guardian recently published an article lamenting that nearly three-quarters of British newspaper coverage of June’s heatwave failed to mention climate change. Researchers, er, Guardian lackeys, examined almost 2,500 stories and found that roughly 72 percent simply reported the weather without turning it into another lecture on the “climate crisis.” To the Guardian, this represents a serious failure of journalism. Gosh, that’s terrible.

To most readers, (normal people) it probably sounds like journalism finally remembered what its job is.

For nearly two decades, climate alarmism has steadily expanded until virtually every weather story became a climate story. Hurricanes were no longer hurricanes. They became climate hurricanes. Floods became climate floods. Wildfires became climate wildfires. Droughts became climate droughts. Heatwaves became perhaps the easiest vehicle of all because every stretch of hot weather could be presented as another warning that civilization was on borrowed time. REPENT!

Historical context of far bigger events disappeared. Natural variability became verboten. And before the pavement even had time to cool, organizations like World Weather Attribution were releasing model-based analyses explaining how climate change supposedly made the event more likely.

The media rarely stopped to ask the obvious question. What else would an organization named World Weather Attribution conclude? Duh!

Its entire purpose is to attribute weather events to climate change. That doesn’t automatically make every study wrong, (well maybe it does, we need a study) but it ought to encourage journalists to apply at least a little skepticism. Instead, too many news organizations simply treat these reports as the final word, reproducing them with little scrutiny and even less historical perspective. In other words, regurgitate it. Garbage in, vomit out.

Apparently, many British editors have begun seeing things differently.

Instead of automatically inserting the obligatory climate paragraph into every heatwave story, they simply reported the weather. Imagine that. The Guardian interprets this as evidence that journalists need better climate education. A more plausible explanation is that editors are finally paying attention to their readers.

After years of being told that every hurricane, every flood, every drought, every wildfire, and every hot summer day is caused by climate change, people have grown weary of the message. They remember hot summers before climate became a political movement. They remember cold winters that inconveniently interrupted the warming narrative. They understand, instinctively, that weather has always varied, sometimes dramatically.

Editors are in the business of keeping readers. They know audiences eventually tune out repetitive messaging, especially when every weather story ends with the same predictable conclusion. Readers want to know how hot it will be, how long the heat will last, and whether they should check on elderly relatives. Many do not need another sermon about carbon emissions attached to the forecast.

The irony is rich. The Guardian intended its article as a warning that Britain’s newspapers are failing to spread the climate message aggressively enough. Instead, it inadvertently documents what may be one of the healthiest trends in journalism in years. Editors appear to be rediscovering an old-fashioned reporting principle: sometimes a heatwave is simply a heatwave.

That doesn’t mean climate never influences weather. It means not every weather event needs to be transformed into a morality play about fossil fuels. Journalism should begin with evidence, not predetermined conclusions, and weather should be reported as weather unless there is compelling observational evidence to justify something more.

Perhaps we’ve finally reached Peak Climate Hype. If the Guardian’s own analysis is any indication, many editors seem to have concluded that readers are tired of having climate change inserted into every forecast and every weather headline.

Now if only The Guardian would follow the example of the newspapers it’s criticizing. I won’t hold my breath, I’d die waiting.