Global warming campaigners routinely distort weather data to boost their narrative.
They feed this information to friendly reporters who put it in print without critical evaluation.
AP reporter Seth Borenstein is a go-to guy for pressure groups pushing warming. He recently cited temperature data showing more record highs occurring than lows as evidence of man-made warming. Seems plausible, if you accept it without thinking, but thinking is what we expect reporters to do.
CFACT’s Marc Morano delved deeper and lays out the facts from climate scientist John Christy:
The occurrence of both record highs and record lows is declining. Record-low events are simply declining more rapidly than record highs. The drop in record lows is associated with development around the weather stations, which causes low temperatures to increase more than highs for a variety of reasons…
I’ve actually done this same analysis for the 682 [U.S. Historical Climatology Network] stations with at least 105 years of record since 1895. It is clear that the occurrence of both record high and record lows has declined since 1895, thanks to many records set from the 1920s to 1954.
That’s right, the global warming crowd wants us to think that record highs and lows have become more frequent, but they have actually declined! That’s inconvenient for their narrative, but you wouldn’t learn it reading Seth Borenstein. Leaving that out is a pretty whopping journalistic sin of omission.
Less records, but more highs than lows? “Urbanization and natural variability,” Dr. Christy explains, not your over-the-top lifestyle and pesky individual freedoms.
The media should do its job and vet global warming claims by speaking to a variety of experts. We shouldn’t have to do their job for them.