Has the media’s climate scare finally peaked? People are realizing: Weather has always been variable
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/20/medias-climate-scare-finally-peaked/
By Anthony Watts
For years, we have been told that every hurricane, wildfire, drought, flood and heat wave is proof that humanity is spiraling toward “climate catastrophe.”
The public may have finally had enough.
An unlikely piece of evidence comes from an equally unlikely source: The Guardian newspaper, one of the world’s most bombastic promoters of climate alarmism. In a recent article, the paper complained that nearly three-quarters of British news stories about the June heat wave never mentioned climate change.
To The Guardian, this represented a journalistic failure. To me, it may represent something far more important: the beginning of the end of climate hype on journalistic autopilot.
The Guardian reported that researchers examined nearly 2,500 heat wave stories published by nine major British newspapers and found that about 72% contained no mention of climate change. Even fewer attempted to connect the weather to Britain’s net-zero policies.
Climate activists were clearly disappointed. They expected every hot day to become another sermon about carbon emissions.
Instead, many editors simply reported the weather. That should not be remarkable, and for most of the history of journalism, it has not been.
Somewhere along the way, however, weather reporting became climate reporting. A thunderstorm was no longer just a thunderstorm. A wildfire was not simply the product of drought, fuel loads, wind, arson or human negligence.
A hurricane often became evidence of climate change before the floodwaters had even receded. Heat waves became perhaps the easiest narrative of all. If temperatures climbed above normal for a few days, the climate crisis had supposedly arrived.
Historical perspective about even bigger past weather events disappeared, natural variability as a cause became an inconvenience and computer models replaced observations. A growing class of organizations emerged with one purpose: to attribute individual weather events to human-caused climate change.
The most prominent of the “sky is falling” promoters cited by the media is the international research collaboration World Weather Attribution. Within days, sometimes hours, of almost every major weather event, it produces a study estimating how much climate change contributed to that event. Those reports receive enormous amounts of media attention despite relying heavily on climate models rather than direct observations.
They are treated less as hypotheses than as verdicts to shape “we told you so”-style articles. Journalists rarely ask the obvious question: What else would an organization called World Weather Attribution be concluding?