Now here's an enormous revelation: It gets hot in the American Southwest.
Oh, yes, this year it's been warmer than usual, and not just in the Southwest. That happens. My father used to tell me about the summer of 1933, which to this day is the hottest summer ever recorded in eastern Iowa. That's the weather. Some years are hot, some years are cool.
But every variation in temperatures is used by the climate scolds to point and proclaim that we must stop using fossil fuels and surrender our modern, technological lifestyle. In the latest instance, the Associated Press is pointing to a study of the current warm weather in the American Southwest and claiming that this could only have been caused by human-emitted CO2. Watts Up With That's Anthony Watts has debunked their notion, which is based on what can only be described as bad science, or more accurately, non-science.
A recent Associated Press (AP) story titled “Records shattered as summer heat hits Southwest in March; ‘This is what climate change looks like’” claims the recent Southwest heatwave is the latest proof that climate change is driving “ultra extremes.” This is highly misleading and unsupported by real-world data. The story and the study it cites rely primarily on speculative modeling and reanalysis data rather than direct long-term observational comparisons. Further, the Southwestern United States is an arid, naturally hot region of the country, with long-term droughts and used up resources likely one of the reasons multiple accomplished native peoples abandoned the area during different periods over time. Heatwaves have been common throughout history with “record” heatwaves having occurred long before “climate change” became a political buzzword and a darling topic of the media.
In other words, the AP, supposedly a major news agency, bought into this study that they seem to have never read.
It gets worse.
The AP’s report relies heavily on a single attribution study from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group titled “Record-shattering March temperatures in Western North America virtually impossible without climate change.” As the AP reports, WWA asserts that the event was “virtually impossible without human-induced climate change.” But reading the study one finds that its conclusions are driven by the theory that humans are definitely causing dangerous climate change applied to climate model ensembles and reanalysis products, with assumptions built in. In other words, it is an exercise in circular reasoning, driven by models calibrated against recent warming trends. That is not the same as direct historical proof.
The fact is, the spring of 2026 isn't anything near a record.
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CBS Boston Is Just Blowing Smoke on Extreme Temps
Here, for discussion, is Mr. Watts' graph of American summers' numbers of "very hot days," that being days with daytime highs over 95 degrees. That's hot by any measure, but look at the trend in this graph:
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) March 26, 2026
An attribution study doesn't involve actually gathering or examining new data. What an attribution study does is to conduct an analysis to determine the extent to which human-caused climate change has influenced a specific weather event. That weather event could be hot weather, cold weather, heavy rain, drought, wildfires, floods, you name it.
The bar must be pretty low. Pretty much every weather incident - and weather, remember, is not climate - is blamed on human greenhouse gas emissions by the "green" left and the climate scolds.
If it's hot: Human-caused climate change.
If it's cold: Human-caused climate change.
If it's raining: Human-caused climate change.
If it's dry: Human-caused climate change.
Wildfires? Human-caused climate change. Floods? Human-caused climate change.
This isn't science. This isn't a scrupulous examination of data. This is fraud, in pursuit of an agenda.
Mr. Watts concludes;
Extreme heat deserves preparedness, planning, and adaptation. But conflating statistical model outputs with physical inevitability is scientifically illegitimate and misleads readers. Bigger heatwaves have occurred in U.S. history before climate attribution became a media staple. Records are expected to be set during a 150-year dataset from time to time. Attribution modeling is not the same thing as observational proof.
Calling this event “virtually impossible without climate change” is not a scientifically determined conclusion. The statement is grounded in probabilistic modeling, not grounded in data and real-world observations. That is not careful climate science; it is a false narrative built on unjustified attribution.
And, again, as I've been saying and writing for years, the global climate is something that we just plain don't understand all that well. It's a vast, chaotic, complex system, wherein trillions of inputs and outputs interact, including solar output, the Earth's orbit, the Earth's rotation, ocean currents, and the atmosphere. That makes it all the more egregious when activists with an axe to grind try to convince us to surrender our lifestyle to serve a cause that is based on nothing more than moonshine.
Yes, it gets warm outside some years. This summer may well be a hot summer. If it is, don't panic, because hot summers always, sooner or later, meet the same cure: Autumn.
