The Associated Press (AP), being part of the legacy media and, while better than some, a left-leaning outlet, has been all-in on climate scoldery since climate scoldery was a thing. They have given platforms to the claims of Al Gore and his ilk, and won't shy away from quoting even the more egregious nuts in the climate-change panic-mongering crowd, like Greta "Doom Pixie" Thunberg.
They also are similar to the rest of the legacy media in seeming incapable of understanding the difference between data and assumptions. We can gather data about the past, but not the future. We can make presumptions about the future based on trends observed in the past, like the fact that we are in an interglacial period, that the climate has been warming gradually since the last major glaciation, and will likely continue to do so, with some variations. We can also look at past data and understand that the current trends aren't any reason to panic, as this has happened before, as recently as the 1930s.
But the legacy media, including the AP, are never ones to let that get in the way of a good scare-monger.
In the next five years, the Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest-year record along the way, according to new United Nations climate projections.
The World Meteorological Organization also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.66 degrees Celsius) between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defenses to lessen human-caused climate change. A hotter globe from the burning of coal, oil and gas means more extreme weather including floods, droughts and heat waves, scientists said.
Yes, we've seen these predictions before.
Writing at ClimateRealism.com, Anthony Watts delivers a brutal takedown of the AP's claim.
The Associated Press (AP) claims in “Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says” that Earth is “overwhelmingly likely” to repeatedly surge past the 1.5°C threshold and experience escalating heatwaves and extreme weather from 2026 to 2030. This is highly misleading if not outright false. The story is built almost entirely on computer model projections, not observed data, and it treats speculative model simulations as though they reflect measured trends.
The AP admits that its claims are “based on the averaging of about 200 runs of computer simulations using 13 different climate models.” That is the core of the story. Not thermometers. Not weather station records. Not satellite observations. Computer simulations. Climate model outputs are not data.
Here's the thing about computer models: They are only as good as our understanding of the thing being modeled. That's why we can model and predict the course of an artillery shell, or a rocket, in flight - Newtonian physics having been a thing for hundreds of years - but we can't accurately model something as vast and chaotic as the planetary climate. Even local weather forecasts, with all of our vaunted technology, are still only good for a few days out. These models are, yes, based in some part on past data, but also on a great deal of guesswork. That's not a good bases for making policy decisions.
Climate models are tools, consisting of assumptions about greenhouse gas forcing, feedbacks, ocean heat uptake, and cloud behavior, fed into computers. They are useful for exploring scenarios. But they provide no real evidence that specific outcomes will occur. As documented in Climate at a Glance’s analysis of climate models versus measured temperature data, model ensembles have historically projected more warming than satellite and balloon observations show. The divergence between model runs and measured lower troposphere temperatures is not trivial. It is persistent.
Here's the kicker: It's not like hot summers, even hotter than the mean, are anything new.
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In fact, in North America, the worst summer heat waves by far took place in the 1930s, during the Dust Bowl era. I remember my father talking about summers when he was a boy - in those years - when there was no air-conditioning except in a few businesses. Dad and his brother would walk several miles to spend the days splashing in the Wapsipinicon River, that being the only way to cool off from eastern Iowa's three-digit heat.
The current interglacial warming trend, in any case, isn't driven by hot summers. It's being driven by milder winters and warmer overnight temperatures, and that's not a bad thing at all; for humans, being essentially tropical animals, cold temperatures are far harder to deal with than warm temperatures.
What the data, the actual data, shows is what we would expect of an increasingly mild interglacial climate. But here's the thing: While we can debunk the claims of the scolds forever and a day, we have to remember that some people want to make policy based on these bad assumptions; that's why I am continually warning about these people wanting to sacrifice our modern comfortable, energy-hungry lifestyles over a possible 1.5 degree rise in mean temperatures.
Remember that on election day. And no matter what the AP or the climate scolds claim, there just isn't any reason to panic.
