Another confusing story highlights why climate hysteria is reaching an end
This article was originally published at The Empowerment Alliance and is re-published here with permission.
Just days before President Trump announced that the EPA would no longer be guided on climate change by the so-called “endangerment finding,” the Washington Post’s newsroom decided to take another bite at the old “Earth is getting hotter” apple.
Contrary to their intent, the resulting story, headlined, “Scientists thought they understood global warming. Then the past three years happened,” made the Trump administration’s decision seem entirely logical.
The story, published Feb. 11, is a lesson in the perils of an entity supposedly focused on journalism conducting its own analysis in the field of climate science, and then producing a story that could not be more confusing if it was intentionally trying to supplant Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” as the most hilarious comedic routine ever founded on the concept of confusion.
“According to a Washington Post analysis,” the Post’s lead paragraph declared, “the fastest warming rate on record occurred in the last 30 years.” The Post noted that it based its analysis on “a dataset from NASA to analyze global average surface temperatures from 1880 to 2025.”
The story was presumably in the works before the U.S. was hit with one of the most frigid stretches in recent years. Never mind. The Post had that covered.
“Even as the United States languishes under a frigid cold snap, the rest of the world is still experiencing unusually warm temperatures,” the Post assured us. Why just consider Nuuk, Greenland (or “Nuuk, Nuuk” as the Three Stooges might have called it) which “saw temperatures in January more than 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average. Parts of Australia, meanwhile, have seen temperatures push past 120 degrees Fahrenheit amid a record heat wave.”
Some places get cold. Some places get hot. Welcome to Earth, visitors. The Post was worried because “for about 40 years — from 1970 to 2010 — global warming proceeded at a fairly steady rate,” inching up about 0.19 degrees Celsius per decade. “Then, that rate began to shift,” the Post reported. “The warming rate ticked up a notch. Temperatures over the past decade have increased by close to 0.27 degrees C per decade — about a 42 percent increase.”
If this seems utterly confusing, you’re not alone. The Post led off by saying that the fastest warming rate on record “occurred in the last 30 years,” which would be since about 1996. But then it said that from 1970-2010, global warming was “pretty steady.” Huh?
It’s never quite clear why “the last 3 years” is featured in the headline and mentioned a couple of times within the story. Don’t try too hard to make sense of it. These people are journalists, er, I mean scientists, er, science reporters – well, dammit, they’re sure not mathematicians. Give them a break.
Follow the story’s winding road: Sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere actually helped cool things off. But they’re bad to breathe, so when countries cracked down on such things, it just heated things up again. Plus, there are fewer low-lying clouds, letting more heat from the sun get through. On the other hand, “Clouds have long been one of the greatest uncertainties in climate science. Clouds are probably helping to cool the Earth, like aerosols, but how much is an open question.” Like everything else.
Please read the following section closely – more than once if you have to – and then let’s review.
About two decades ago, according to the Post, “Countries also began shifting from coal and oil to wind and solar power. As a result, global sulfur dioxide emissions have fallen about 40 percent since the mid-2000s; China’s emissions have fallen even more. That effect has been compounded in recent years by a new international regulation that slashed sulfur emissions from ships by about 85 percent. That explains part of why warming has kicked up a bit.”
Wait, coal, oil and sulfur emissions helped keep the Earth cooler? And cutting down on those emissions have made the Earth warmer? Here’s the Post’s explanation: “For decades, a portion of the warming unleashed by greenhouse gas emissions was ‘masked’ by sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles cause heart and lung disease when people inhale polluted air, but they also deflect the sun’s rays.” So, pick your poison.
The Post did quote one expert who’s not yet buying the too-hot-to-handle narrative. Chris Smith, a research fellow at the University of Leeds, told the Post, “It’s still too early to definitively conclude there’s an increase in the rate of warming,” and he wants to see a few more years of
additional data.
The Post, on the other hand, may not have that kind of time. In early February, the Post announced another round of layoffs, and while initial estimates guessed a loss of about one-third of its newsroom, “an accounting by the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, the union that represents Post journalists, finds that the paper’s management eliminated closer to half of the journalists it used to employ,” according to The Washingtonian.
It never occurs to the far-left (formerly mainstream) media that its demise might be attributable to more than economic factors or the rise of the internet. Just as important is the clear bias and agenda- driven politics that resulted in a loss of trust by millions of Americans who are not part of the far-left bubble that the media increasingly served.
The era of climate change hysteria is thankfully nearing its end. Some of its biggest promoters are sharing its fate.
Gary Abernathy is a longtime newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He was a contributing columnist for the Washington Post from 2017-2023 and a frequent guest analyst across numerous media platforms. He is a contributing opinion columnist for The Empowerment Alliance, which advocates for realistic approaches to energy consumption and environmental conservation.