We understand why the media concentrate on unusual things. And up to a point it makes sense; the headline “Sabre-tooth tiger lurking outside village” in the Paleolithic Times was legitimately more newsworthy than “No sabre-tooth tiger outside village”. But to focus on the unusual while implying it’s now normal is misleading. Thus every Heatmap AM, and as it is from editors@heatmap.news we say they are at least ostensibly offering news, starts with a roundup of weird weather conditions including, for instance this from Nov. 13: “Heavy rain and mountain snow is disrupting flights across the Southwestern United States; Record November heat across Spain brought temperatures as high as 84 degrees Fahrenheit.” And on Nov. 12 “Rainfall in Northern California could top 6 inches today; Thousands evacuated in the last few hours in Taiwan as Typhoon Fung-wong makes landfall.” We say roundup. But of course it’s cherry-picking because when’s the last time there wasn’t inconvenient weather, or at least surprising weather, somewhere on our big planet? Instead they make it sound as though we’re experiencing, oh, we don’t know, climate breakdown, by never saying stuff like “Large swaths of eastern Europe experience typical weather again.”
These things have real-world consequences including this odd one in an Associated Press business story:
“Home Depot’s third-quarter was mixed with fewer violent storms reaching shore, more anxiety among U.S. consumers and a housing market that is in a deep funk. The company lowered its fiscal 2025 adjusted earnings forecast but raised its expectations for sales growth.”
It’s an ill wind, isn’t it? See, the problem is that Home Depot sells things used to build and rebuild and if you’re expecting a bunch of storms because you read alarmist media and then you don’t get a bunch of storms because alarmist media don’t look at real-world data, you sell fewer nail-guns, drywall and so forth to repair contractors. Which you then explain using words that steer delicately around it:
“‘Our results missed our expectations primarily due to the lack of storms in the third quarter, which resulted in greater than expected pressure in certain categories,’ CEO Ted Decker said in a statement.”
Greater than expected pressure in certain categories. Yeah. Including barometric in North Atlantic storms.
To be clear, we’re not calling Home Depot vultures. They don’t cause the storms, they just help folks recover. But if they and the wizards who fail to foresee stock prices do listen to the vultures they’re going to be misled.
Thus, to continue with Heatmap as an example, their Heatmap AM newsletter for Nov. 14 began:
“A powerful storm is rolling in from the Pacific to dump several inches of rain across Southern California, threatening floods • The Northeast is set to remain roughly 5 degrees Fahrenheit below historical averages, with New York City topping out at 50 degrees • A major storm is developing over Namibia, bringing flooding to its southern regions.”
Note that the one temperature reference there is to unusual cold. But global warming long ago gave rhetorical way to “climate change”, a theory that explains everything and therefore nothing because in the first place it cites anything unusual as proof of “climate breakdown” and in the second it treats as unusual the fact that weather is often bad.
And so on Nov. 19 they went with:
“The West Coast’s parade of storms continues with downpours along the California shoreline, threatening mudslides • Up to 10 inches of rain is headed for the Ozarks • Temperatures climbed beyond 50 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland this week before beginning a downward slide.”
Why the Ozarks? Is it a lot of rain? Does Greenland warming up a bit before cooling off constitute anything unusual, let alone alarming? But they somehow make it sound that way, and never ever happen to say “In East West Manikota, temperatures were stable and typical.”
Moreover, their Nov. 20 scare-a-thon went:
“A powerful storm system is bringing heavy rain and flash flooding from Texas to Missouri for the next few days • An Arctic chill is sweeping over Western Europe, bringing heavy snow to Denmark, southern Sweden, and northern Germany • A cold snap in East Asia has plunged Seoul and Beijing into freezing temperatures.”
Notice that apart from flash flooding in places infamous for it, the items are about cold. But where there might be heat waves or worse, with cold you just get a chill or a snap whereas on the 18th “Parts of Libya are roasting in temperatures as high as 95 degrees Fahrenheit.” Roasting.
They all seem to do it. Reuters “Sustainable Switch” announced on Nov 18, not at all spinning by linking something unimportant and irrelevant to something totally different except in also being both:
“A weekend of weather-related disasters led to more deaths in Indonesia’s Central Java province, where heavy rains triggered a landslide, while Storm Claudia killed three people and injured dozens in Portugal. The catastrophes come as delegates wrap up negotiations this week at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil.”
You get the idea. There’s no effort to indicate that heavy rains in central Java are unusual, that this landslide was worse, or that storms haven’t been killing people in Portugal and in the parts of the world that aren’t Portugal since the invention of the human being. Yet somehow, like Jim Garrison’s “propinquity”, the fact that there was bad weather in two places “as delegates wrap up negotiations” makes COP30 crucial in the face of these “catastrophes”.
The notion that the weather is getting worse is so deeply embedded in the minds of zealots that they say it constantly and check it never. In his statement on Remembrance Day Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney of course politicized the solemn occasion and also polluted it with bad science:
“In an increasingly dangerous and divided world, remembrance is also vigilance. Our sovereignty and our security – and those of our allies – are not guaranteed. The women and men of the Canadian Armed Forces protect them every day. They rush to communities as wildfires and floods roll in, they airlift life-saving aid across waters, they stand guard in the Arctic, and they defend NATO’s Eastern Flank. When people see a maple leaf on a sleeve or the back of a truck – they see hope, they get help. Today, we pause to remember those acts of heroic service. We remember that our rights, our freedoms, our way of life were fought for and were won by Canadians who answer the call. Lest we forget.”
Forget what? To verify whether “wildfires and floods roll in” these days or just happen as they always did or, in the case of wildfires, a lot less frequently than in the recorded past?
But mere reality no longer counts for much. Thus the Canadian Public Health Association, on October 29, misled the public with:
“Canada’s leading health organizations are calling on the federal government to take immediate, coordinated action to protect health in the face of intensifying climate impacts.”
Again we do not dispute that they are calling on the feds to do this vital vague thing. But there are no “intensifying climate impacts” and they don’t even try to show that there are.
At least they’re not The Atlantic, raving:
“What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century/ Many places may become uninhabitable. Many people may be on their own.”
On their own? What? Well see um uh boo Trump!
“Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.”
Where is this coming from? It’s hard to say. Or rather, they do say and it’s hard to believe:
“How do we know this? As ever, all it takes is looking around.”
We looked. Winter is coming.
What a lot of bollocks news organisations promulgate. Universally, it seems. Welcome to a post truth world, different to earlier times only by the ubiquity with which The Message is given. Unless maybe we count any immediate pre-war call to arms, just before the readership took up arms, and then died. But not the newspaper barons!